Feelings we label as love can point at a partner, a child, a friend, a stranger helped on the street, a dog or cat, or even a landscape. A 2024 Cerebral Cortex brain-scan study published online 26 August 2024 compared six kinds of love using short audio stories and a short imagery period. During the imagery period, parental love showed striatum and thalamus activation that was not found for the other love types.
Six kinds of love and a neutral control inside the scanner
Researchers at Aalto University and colleagues collected functional MRI (fMRI) data on a 3 T MAGNETOM Skyra scanner (Siemens) while volunteers listened to three-sentence stories about a romantic partner, a child, a friend, a stranger, a dog or cat, or beautiful nature, plus neutral vignettes. Adults were Finnish-speaking, in a self-described loving couple relationship, had at least one child, were healthy, and took no regular medication, as described in the paper's subjects section. The fMRI sample included fifty-five participants: twenty-nine women, twenty-six men, ages twenty-eight to fifty-three, mean age 40.3 years, with twenty-seven pet owners and twenty-eight who did not own pets. Each narrative lasted roughly 13-15 seconds and ended with a direct prompt such as "You feel love for [x]" or "You love [x]," followed by 10 seconds of silence for immersion in the feeling. Neutral stories described ordinary moments without affection. The analysis treated the story-listening period and the following imagery period separately.
Reward and social zones track how close a bond feels
Compared with neutral stories, love stories changed activity in cortical and subcortical regions, including medial prefrontal, orbitofrontal, cingulate, striatal, and thalamic areas, as summarized in the report. The introduction also ties the results line to earlier imaging work on romantic and maternal love and on attachment and reward networks. Interpersonal love recruited social brain areas more than pet-only or nature-focused love. Closer affiliative bonds were associated with stronger and more widespread reward-system activation than love for strangers, pets, or nature. After scanning, romantic and parental love were rated highest across the measured dimensions, and love for strangers matched participants' own idea of love the least. This pattern broadly matched the imaging results: during the audio listening period, closer human bonds showed more widespread involvement of regions such as insula, striatum, thalamus, and brainstem than stranger-focused love did, whereas stranger trials produced smaller patches of those signals.
Pet love borrows social-brain paths mainly for owners
Love for animals in this task did not show the full interpersonal pattern for everyone. In pet owners, love for pets activated the same social-cognition hubs significantly more than in participants without pets. Among owners, pet-love stories produced stronger activity in the precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex and in the left temporoparietal junction than in non-owners. The authors suggest that affection for companion animals can recruit some of the same social-cognition systems seen in human-directed love, especially in people who live with pets.
Why one Helsinki cohort cannot settle every debate about love
Brain data here come from a convenience sample recruited around Helsinki using email lists and social media, not a random slice of humanity. Stories deliberately avoided touch, which removes a major real-world channel of affection. The authors argue that love reflects both biology and culture, so these brain maps should not be treated as universal for all people and settings. Readers should treat the findings as snapshots of contrasts during scripted listening and imagery, not as a scorecard for how "real" any private feeling is.
Keeping perspective on one fMRI study
If you follow this line of research, the August 2024 open-access paper is a clear reference point. Larger, more diverse samples would be needed to test whether the pet-owner difference replicates outside this cohort; that is a reader-level suggestion, not a hypothesis spelled out as a next step inside the article itself. In general, fMRI compares task periods in a laboratory; it does not by itself diagnose attachment style or tell anyone what to do in a relationship. For mental health concerns tied to bonding or loss, speak with a qualified clinician rather than inferring from group averages.
Sources and related information
Cerebral Cortex – Six types of loves differentially recruit reward and social cognition brain areas – 2024
The peer-reviewed Cerebral Cortex article at this DOI documents the six-story design, the fifty-five-person cohort, pet-owner splits, listening- and imagery-period contrasts, post-scan ratings, and the report that during imagery parental love showed striatum and thalamus activation not seen for the other love types.
Oxford University Press – Cerebral Cortex article page – 2024
The publisher landing page hosts the same peer-reviewed paper for readers who prefer the journal site.
PubMed – Record for PMID 39183646 – 2024
The PubMed record indexes the title, abstract, and bibliographic metadata for NIH-style lookups.
Aalto University – Research portal publication record – 2024
The Aalto research portal entry is an institutional metadata mirror (authors, affiliations, DOI pointer), not a separate explanatory article.
