Abstract
Leisure activity is one of key ingredients for individual happiness and life satisfaction. Enjoying leisure activity with one’s partner can increase marital satisfaction. This study aimed to identify the neural basis of making decisions on participation in a leisure activity with one’s romantic partner as well as the relationship between leisure activity and satisfaction with life. Thirty-seven soon-to-be married heterosexual couples were participated in functional MRI while deciding participation in specific leisure activities in the individual, partner, with-friend, and with-partner conditions. We constructed analysis of variance models and investigated couple characteristics such as personality similarity, leisure activity matching rate, and spatial similarity in the bilateral frontoparietal network. The results showed decreased activity in the bilateral hippocampus during the task in the with-partner condition. Individual leisure activity was correlated with quality of life in males, whereas participation in leisure activity might require more cognitive loading on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in females. The leisure activity matching rate was correlated with courtship period, personality similarity, and spatial similarity of the right frontoparietal network during the task. These findings suggest that although there are different activation pattern in making decisions on leisure activity between romantic couples, spatial similarity of the partner’s social brain networks may be a marker that predicts how well the couple enjoys leisure activity together. In addition, our couples’ data analysis provides a scientific basis for the saying that romantic couples become more similar the longer they are together.
Highlights
Work, and leisure activity have been identified as key ingredients for individual happiness and life satisfaction[1]
This study aimed to identify the neural basis of making decisions on participation in a leisure activity with the partner in a soon-to-be married couple and the relationship between leisure activity and satisfaction with life
Our research question was “How similar or different are the neural responses in soon-to-be married couples when they think about leisure activity enjoying individually or together and with their partner or friend?” In order to answer this question, we developed an experimental functional magnetic resonance imaging task asking about participation in various leisure activities in four experimental conditions: individual, partner, with-friend, and with-partner
Summary
Work, and leisure activity have been identified as key ingredients for individual happiness and life satisfaction[1]. People enjoy leisure activity individually or with others, including romantic partners. Brain regions related to self-referential processing are activated when people think about themselves and others[11]. Together with the medial prefrontal regions, the temporoparietal junction has been consistently found to be involved in theory of mind ability in several previous studies[14]. People in love show increased functional connectivity between the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction compared to people not in love[18] These regions may be love-related neural markers and would be fundamental components when individuals think about leisure activities that they prefer or dislike. Marital satisfaction increases when a married couple enjoys their leisure activity together rather than individually[22,23,24]. Because a family is a group of people living together, soon-to-be married couples need to learn to share their leisure activities; this can be a good starting point for achieving happiness
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