9 ms·

A neural link between affective understanding and interpersonal attraction [pdf]

119 points by lainon 10y ago

nerdponx 10y ago
Makes sense. One of the most attractive things about my girlfriend initially was that she and I related some some things that a lot of other people don't seem to get.
- computerwizard 10y ago
  Exact same experience here.
- booli 10y ago
  I am madly in love with a girl because of just this. We understand each other where others don't, or would even judge us for the same (mis)understanding.
- woliveirajr 10y ago
  I didn't get that much things in common in the beginning, except that we would understand and laugh from the same jokes. It took a while to refine many other things, like understanding things without needing to say and so on. You have to have things in common to be a resting place, so that you have peace of mind while doing those things together. You also have to have things that you're good at and that makes the other person proud (kind of envy) of you, things that they'll contemplate while you're doing. And, finally, things that you suck at but they are good, so that you'll also stare while they are doing and will keep you enchanted.
- visakanv 10y ago
  This phenomenon is alluded to in the spoken bit at the closing of Jason Mraz's "Details In The Fabric", with "You're an island of reality in an ocean of diarrhoea".
novia 10y ago
A lot of my ex-partners complained that we "didn't have anything in common," to the extent that I started telling new love interests, "Look, I already know we don't have anything in common. Don't bring it up later as a reason to leave." After reading this I wonder if it was actually that my ex-partners were incapable of understanding how someone unlike them would react to different situations. I was usually able to predict their reactions, but maybe it was only a one way street.
- kkoomi 10y ago
  It may be that that's just a common surface excuse for another underlying reason, whether related to you or not.
- pinkrooftop 10y ago
  but you're the common denominator so its their fault, ok right
  - naasking 10y ago
    I don't see anywhere the OP assigns blame to anyone.
    - pinkrooftop 10y ago
      >I wonder if it was actually that my ex-partners were incapable of understanding how someone unlike them would react to different situations. I was usually able to predict their reactions, but maybe it was only a one way street
      - naasking 10y ago
        Perhaps you should ponder the meaning of "I wonder if" and contrast with your attempt to interpret this statement as an unequivocal assignment of blame.
      - PlugTunin 10y ago
        Fair to speculate that the other person was the problem. They didn't say it was a certain thing. Some people have blind spots that prevent them from realizing that their actions may not fly with the other person. I can't speak to how objective this poster's self-evaluation was, but I guess they felt they were better able to predict the reactions of the other person, and accordingly, were better able to avoid doing things to irritate others. To be fair, I do see how you could misinterpret this as blaming the other person; but an alternate take is that the person is brainstorming, after reading the article, that the other person was simply less adept at predicting behavior.
swehner 10y ago
I don't know if the authors are trying to avoid it, but what they are describing hints at a similar conclusion for the opposites of attraction: hate + racism
- pinkrooftop 10y ago
  not really. It's saying if you can't understand the emotional state then you dont get the reward so its more neutral than hate
macey 10y ago
Great read. Makes me reflect on my own taste, though. I seem to be attracted to people I can't quite understand, people who take some work for me to figure out. Maybe there's a solid relational foundation between us, but we're always quite different people and I'm kept guessing a lot of the time. I find it interesting, fun, stimulating. I'm sure there are plenty like me in that respect. Any armchair hypotheses for that?
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  I used to be that way (I went as far as dating a few borderline people). I didn't end up with someone like that though. I think partners like you describe are fun relationships but difficult partners long term. Its exciting but you probably don't want to buy a house and have kids with exciting. To each their own of course.
- learned 10y ago
  I'm the same way, and for me I believe it is a combination of being extremely intrigued and gratefully removed from my own world. Meeting an interesting person (romantic or not) is a great experience for that dual effect of mental stimulation (your "figuring it out" description) and being confronted with another person's reality which may feel much more vibrant than your own.
- rokhayakebe 10y ago
  Genuine question: are you a woman?
- abledon 10y ago
  I'll make one in a slightly comical sense: You are most likely a lover of problems and puzzles. Relationships where you don't understand the other person, is the Ultimate Problem Puzzle, but in the emotional field zone, where you can experience and interact with the problem in so much more ways than just computer code. The same dopamine high of breaking through in solving a problem in the messy legacy code base, refactoring down those 1000s of lines into 100s, increasing the webserver's performance etc.. those same circuits are firing when trying to 'fix' or 'solve' the indecipherable person you are dating. however, sometimes after a beginner hacker starts, maybe 3,4,5 years, and after their philosophizing-abstractionist hacker phase, they become the 'wise hacker', where writing ---no code at all--- is the best code to try and solve, or bypass problems. Maybe this is what people feel when they meet a S.O. who share mutual intrinsic emotional understanding. I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy but I could see some other pattern-based thinkers branching off it.
estefan 10y ago
What's the TLDR?
- riazrizvi 10y ago
  The more certain you are of how someone feels, the more you are attracted to them. Not only how they feel, but also how they are motivated. They conclude this from looking at patterns of neural activity.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    But most importantly, the "attraction" is an intrinsic reward signal generated by your own brain from judging that it understands another person well. The other person can't actually alter that intrinsic reward except by making their actions easier to understand.
    - riazrizvi 10y ago
      Hmm, that does seem most important.
      - PlugTunin 10y ago
        Indeed, unpredictable people/situations, are less attractive.
    - papapra 10y ago
      It explains why being anxious or having low self-esteem is unattractive.
      - duderific 10y ago
        Well, it sorta depends on how the anxiety or low self esteem manifests itself. If the person is aware of their anxiety and doesn't try to cover it with over-compensation in the other direction (excessive self assurance or arrogance), then it can be rather charming.
fiatjaf 10y ago
What about intellectual understanding?
- riazrizvi 10y ago
  They said emotions, motivations and intentions. So probably intellectual ideas that are not impersonal?
lainon 10y ago
Conclusion. In sum, we have shown that subjective understanding during social interaction can modulate interpersonal attraction. Interestingly, the findings of the current study suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying individual adjustments of interpersonal attraction during social encounters might act through internal reward signals that are partly independent of external feedback, which makes them perhaps less prone to cheating by potential cooperation partners. To investigate the interaction between intrinsic confidence signals and other — honest or manipulative — signals sent back and forth between communication partners and to examine the neural determinants of the dynamics of human social relations in larger groups (“social connectomes”) remain challenging tasks for future studies. The current study suggests that mutual understanding is an important factor in interpersonal attraction, and that further research into the role of a common neural vocabulary in interpersonal attraction will lead to a better understanding of the neurobiological factors that define human social relations.
- gcr 10y ago
  Would you mind unpacking this? This language is harder to follow than it should be. Here's my attempt, please revise: 1. Our own attraction of our partners is modulated by our internal reward machinery. 2. This reward machinery doesn't depend on external signals very much. That means it's hard for our partners to manipulate. 3. Future work: Investigating how our intrinsic confidence signals are shaped by our partner's messages 4. More future work: Investigating these effects in larger groups 5. Takeaway: Mutual understanding is an important factor in interpersonal interaction 6. Takeaway: We should research a vocabulary to describe neural states; this will help researchers express interpersonal factors more precisely
  - choxi 10y ago
    The paragraph summarizing the experiment is clarifying: > Significance. > Humans interacting with other humans must be able to understand their interaction partner’s affect and motivations, often without words. We examined whether people are attracted to others whose affective behavior they can easily understand. For this, we asked participants to watch different persons experiencing different emotions. We found the better a participant thought they could understand another person’s emotion the more they felt attracted toward that person. Importantly, these individual changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the participant’s reward circuit, which in turn signaled how well the participant’s “neural vocabulary” was suited to decode the other’s behavior. This research elucidates neurobiological processes that might play an important role in the formation and success of human social relations.
ruuki 10y ago
Welcome to Hacker News Dear Abby thread!
- pjc50 10y ago
  Another step in the transition to HN becoming Reddit :(
AlexCoventry 10y ago
How is stuff like this still news, given the "epistemological crisis" in psychology research? Did they pre-register their analysis or arrange some kind of independent replication?

119 points by lainon 10y ago

Makes sense. One of the most attractive things about my girlfriend initially was that she and I related some some things that a lot of other people don't seem to get.

computerwizard 10y ago
Exact same experience here.
booli 10y ago
I am madly in love with a girl because of just this. We understand each other where others don't, or would even judge us for the same (mis)understanding.
woliveirajr 10y ago
I didn't get that much things in common in the beginning, except that we would understand and laugh from the same jokes. It took a while to refine many other things, like understanding things without needing to say and so on. You have to have things in common to be a resting place, so that you have peace of mind while doing those things together. You also have to have things that you're good at and that makes the other person proud (kind of envy) of you, things that they'll contemplate while you're doing. And, finally, things that you suck at but they are good, so that you'll also stare while they are doing and will keep you enchanted.
visakanv 10y ago
This phenomenon is alluded to in the spoken bit at the closing of Jason Mraz's "Details In The Fabric", with "You're an island of reality in an ocean of diarrhoea".

novia 10y ago

A lot of my ex-partners complained that we "didn't have anything in common," to the extent that I started telling new love interests, "Look, I already know we don't have anything in common. Don't bring it up later as a reason to leave." After reading this I wonder if it was actually that my ex-partners were incapable of understanding how someone unlike them would react to different situations. I was usually able to predict their reactions, but maybe it was only a one way street.

kkoomi 10y ago
It may be that that's just a common surface excuse for another underlying reason, whether related to you or not.
pinkrooftop 10y ago
but you're the common denominator so its their fault, ok right
- naasking 10y ago
  I don't see anywhere the OP assigns blame to anyone.
  - pinkrooftop 10y ago
    >I wonder if it was actually that my ex-partners were incapable of understanding how someone unlike them would react to different situations. I was usually able to predict their reactions, but maybe it was only a one way street
    - naasking 10y ago
      Perhaps you should ponder the meaning of "I wonder if" and contrast with your attempt to interpret this statement as an unequivocal assignment of blame.
    - PlugTunin 10y ago
      Fair to speculate that the other person was the problem. They didn't say it was a certain thing. Some people have blind spots that prevent them from realizing that their actions may not fly with the other person. I can't speak to how objective this poster's self-evaluation was, but I guess they felt they were better able to predict the reactions of the other person, and accordingly, were better able to avoid doing things to irritate others. To be fair, I do see how you could misinterpret this as blaming the other person; but an alternate take is that the person is brainstorming, after reading the article, that the other person was simply less adept at predicting behavior.

swehner 10y ago

I don't know if the authors are trying to avoid it, but what they are describing hints at a similar conclusion for the opposites of attraction: hate + racism

pinkrooftop 10y ago
not really. It's saying if you can't understand the emotional state then you dont get the reward so its more neutral than hate

macey 10y ago

Great read. Makes me reflect on my own taste, though. I seem to be attracted to people I can't quite understand, people who take some work for me to figure out. Maybe there's a solid relational foundation between us, but we're always quite different people and I'm kept guessing a lot of the time. I find it interesting, fun, stimulating. I'm sure there are plenty like me in that respect. Any armchair hypotheses for that?

cmdrfred 10y ago
I used to be that way (I went as far as dating a few borderline people). I didn't end up with someone like that though. I think partners like you describe are fun relationships but difficult partners long term. Its exciting but you probably don't want to buy a house and have kids with exciting. To each their own of course.
learned 10y ago
I'm the same way, and for me I believe it is a combination of being extremely intrigued and gratefully removed from my own world. Meeting an interesting person (romantic or not) is a great experience for that dual effect of mental stimulation (your "figuring it out" description) and being confronted with another person's reality which may feel much more vibrant than your own.
rokhayakebe 10y ago
Genuine question: are you a woman?
abledon 10y ago
I'll make one in a slightly comical sense: You are most likely a lover of problems and puzzles. Relationships where you don't understand the other person, is the Ultimate Problem Puzzle, but in the emotional field zone, where you can experience and interact with the problem in so much more ways than just computer code. The same dopamine high of breaking through in solving a problem in the messy legacy code base, refactoring down those 1000s of lines into 100s, increasing the webserver's performance etc.. those same circuits are firing when trying to 'fix' or 'solve' the indecipherable person you are dating. however, sometimes after a beginner hacker starts, maybe 3,4,5 years, and after their philosophizing-abstractionist hacker phase, they become the 'wise hacker', where writing ---no code at all--- is the best code to try and solve, or bypass problems. Maybe this is what people feel when they meet a S.O. who share mutual intrinsic emotional understanding. I don't personally subscribe to this philosophy but I could see some other pattern-based thinkers branching off it.

estefan 10y ago

What's the TLDR?

riazrizvi 10y ago
The more certain you are of how someone feels, the more you are attracted to them. Not only how they feel, but also how they are motivated. They conclude this from looking at patterns of neural activity.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  But most importantly, the "attraction" is an intrinsic reward signal generated by your own brain from judging that it understands another person well. The other person can't actually alter that intrinsic reward except by making their actions easier to understand.
  - riazrizvi 10y ago
    Hmm, that does seem most important.
    - PlugTunin 10y ago
      Indeed, unpredictable people/situations, are less attractive.
  - papapra 10y ago
    It explains why being anxious or having low self-esteem is unattractive.
    - duderific 10y ago
      Well, it sorta depends on how the anxiety or low self esteem manifests itself. If the person is aware of their anxiety and doesn't try to cover it with over-compensation in the other direction (excessive self assurance or arrogance), then it can be rather charming.

fiatjaf 10y ago

What about intellectual understanding?

riazrizvi 10y ago
They said emotions, motivations and intentions. So probably intellectual ideas that are not impersonal?

lainon 10y ago

Conclusion. In sum, we have shown that subjective understanding during social interaction can modulate interpersonal attraction. Interestingly, the findings of the current study suggest that the neural mechanisms underlying individual adjustments of interpersonal attraction during social encounters might act through internal reward signals that are partly independent of external feedback, which makes them perhaps less prone to cheating by potential cooperation partners. To investigate the interaction between intrinsic confidence signals and other — honest or manipulative — signals sent back and forth between communication partners and to examine the neural determinants of the dynamics of human social relations in larger groups (“social connectomes”) remain challenging tasks for future studies. The current study suggests that mutual understanding is an important factor in interpersonal attraction, and that further research into the role of a common neural vocabulary in interpersonal attraction will lead to a better understanding of the neurobiological factors that define human social relations.

gcr 10y ago
Would you mind unpacking this? This language is harder to follow than it should be. Here's my attempt, please revise: 1. Our own attraction of our partners is modulated by our internal reward machinery. 2. This reward machinery doesn't depend on external signals very much. That means it's hard for our partners to manipulate. 3. Future work: Investigating how our intrinsic confidence signals are shaped by our partner's messages 4. More future work: Investigating these effects in larger groups 5. Takeaway: Mutual understanding is an important factor in interpersonal interaction 6. Takeaway: We should research a vocabulary to describe neural states; this will help researchers express interpersonal factors more precisely
- choxi 10y ago
  The paragraph summarizing the experiment is clarifying: > Significance. > Humans interacting with other humans must be able to understand their interaction partner’s affect and motivations, often without words. We examined whether people are attracted to others whose affective behavior they can easily understand. For this, we asked participants to watch different persons experiencing different emotions. We found the better a participant thought they could understand another person’s emotion the more they felt attracted toward that person. Importantly, these individual changes in interpersonal attraction were predicted by activity in the participant’s reward circuit, which in turn signaled how well the participant’s “neural vocabulary” was suited to decode the other’s behavior. This research elucidates neurobiological processes that might play an important role in the formation and success of human social relations.

ruuki 10y ago

Welcome to Hacker News Dear Abby thread!

pjc50 10y ago
Another step in the transition to HN becoming Reddit :(

AlexCoventry 10y ago

How is stuff like this still news, given the "epistemological crisis" in psychology research? Did they pre-register their analysis or arrange some kind of independent replication?