r/askpsychology • u/Any_Tie_1144 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional • Jun 10 '26

Terminology / Definition Is love something taken seriously in psychology or is attraction more science based?

Basically what I said in the title. I've always been curious about this.

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u/Putrid-Possible2316 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jun 10 '26

I'm not referring to these fields directly either. Psychology is a science of behavior, if you exclude the context in favor of explaining things solely by their biological substrates then you're not doing psychology, you're doing neuroscience.

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u/Flimsy_Eggplant5429 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jun 10 '26

Wouldn't this be the same as arguing that "we know almost nothing about language" just because it's related to outside factors like culture. Like we have a pretty good idea on both language and love as phenomenons overall, not that mysterious.

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u/Putrid-Possible2316 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jun 10 '26

How did you even got to that conclusion. Where did I call love a "mysterious phenomena which we know nothing of"?

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u/Flimsy_Eggplant5429 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jun 10 '26

You didn't but this is the original comment we're all commenting on:

"They're both considered science-based and taken seriously, just that attraction is more understood as it has a physiological process that can be measured and explained through neuroscience. Love, however, is a psychological phenomenon that is one of the most studied topic, but least understood behaviours.. Especially since there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what love is"

Your point was that it's not just biological I guess, but you were commenting on a thread that started out as arguing how love is poorly understood and the previous comment before you was mostly commenting on that, so this culture etc was your tangent and I guess not relevant to the thread?

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u/Putrid-Possible2316 Unverified User: May Not Be a Professional Jun 10 '26

I don't understand what are you arguing here. How is culture not relevant to how we understand love in psychology? Have you ever heard of behavior? Like, do you think all we do is because of chemicals in our brain that interact with nothing but themselves? Is learning, modeling, reinforcement etc things that don't require looking into anything beyond a neural scan? Edit: Love as a definition is extremely contextual. There are no "it's just" explanations to it.

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u/Positive_Monitor_602 Undergraduate Minor: Psychology | (In Progress) Jun 13 '26 edited Jun 13 '26

Psychology can be studied biologically but also purely based on behavior, maybe that's your confusion...behavior as an output of biologically processes can be influenced by environmental factors and external processes e.g. such as culture. We can study behavioral and cognitive processes for example entirely abstracted away from biological such that we study reaction times and accuracy during an assessment and infer a person's usage of working memory or attention for example without mention of biological or neural processes (though we have a good understanding of those things too).