Can we measure love? │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin

Are you the clingy type? Or do you need your personal space? Your attachment style will have a deep impact on your relationships and even your mental health.

The answer to the question “what is love?” is highly complex and includes both biological and psychosocial factors. Often, it is largely subjective. How I love and how you love are going to be different. Attachment theory is an attempt by psychology to provide an objective measure of love. It describes how people experience and behave in their most intimate relationships. Attachment relationships are rare in your life. You will have had one with your carer. You have them maybe with your lovers but maybe not all of them. With your children and maybe your close friends.

Attachment relationships are hard to define, but we know one when we see them. They're about people who want to maintain proximity to each other as much as possible. They help each other's reactions to the environment, to help them navigate the world. And when they are apart, they experience severe separation distress. Think of a child separated from its parent.

Secure attachment allows freedom to learn and explore the environment, secure in the knowledge they can return to their attachment figure. When we look at attachment, we assess it on two different dimensions, which relates to your feelings and behaviours when you're in a relationship. The first is how anxious you are about being abandoned. And the second is to do with how much you avoid proximity to another person. Ultimately, when we place you on these two dimensions, you can be one of two profiles. You can either be secure or insecure.

So, when we look at romantic relationships, people who are secure in their romantic relationships experience low anxiety about being abandoned, and they like proximity to the person, intimacy, both emotional and physical. They gain huge confidence from being in the relationship, but they don't need to cling to the person to enable them to have self-esteem. Preoccupied people, who are one of the insecure profiles, have high anxiety about being abandoned. And the way they deal with this is by sticking to the person they're in a relationship with, hoping that they won't be abandoned. Fearful avoidant people also experience high anxiety about the relationship. However, differently to preoccupied people, they deal with that by avoiding relationships, because by not having one you can't get hurt. And the last insecure profile is dismissing avoidant. These people experience no anxiety of being abandoned, because to be honest they're not sure they want to be in a relationship. They might actively find emotional and physical intimacy difficult.

When we look at childhood attachment, this is really the most important factor on your attachment profile as an adult. It's how you attached to your carers when you were a child. Secure children are those who are confident about exploring the world away from their parent, but when they are reunited with their parents, they react in a happy and positive way. One of the insecure profiles for children is disorganised. These children do not react in a predictable way when they are interacting with their parent, and do not re-bond with their parent in a predictable way when they have been apart. Resistive children are the ones who resist actually having any secure base with the parents, so they are distressed both when they're with the parent and also when they are apart. And avoidant children avoid forming a bond with their carer.

Our post-birth development has a major impact on our brain development, because we are born not fully formed. Therefore, there is a period of post-birth brain growth, particularly in the first two years of life. One area that's growing at this point is your prefrontal cortex, which is where your social cognition sits; the cognition that underpins your social relationships. It is highly influenced by the environment in which you are found.

And therefore, the relationship you have with your carer really does shape how you're going to deal with relationships as you go forward through life. Knowing our attachment styles can help us understand why we might behave the way we do in relationships. And it's also worth remembering that no attachment style is wrong. They all have benefits. However, if you're unhappy with your attachment style, then it can change through work. Some aspects of how we love are just encoded in our nature as human beings. But wait, who said only human beings can love? Join us next time to find out if love is exclusively human.

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