Washington: Ever wondered why some people pine over their lost love for long? Scientists say it is because romantic rejection triggers the same effect on brain akin to kicking an addiction.

    The study, the first to examine the brains of heartbroken people, found imagination of their former partners activate their brain region associated with addiction cravings, control of emotions, feelings of attachment and physical pain and distress. The results provide insight into why it might be hard for some people to get over a break up and why some people take extreme steps like committing suicide, experts said.
    “Romantic love is an addiction,” said study author Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “It’s a very powerfully wonderful addiction when things are going well and a perfectly horrible addiction when things are going poorly,” she was quoted as saying by LiveScience.

    For their study, the researchers scanned the brains of 15 college-aged volunteers who had all recently experienced a break up, but were still in love with the person who had rejected them. In the experiment, participants were shown images of their exlovers and asked to recall memories of their time together. Researchers found that when shown pictures of a former loved one, the brain reacted in the the ventral tegmental area, associated with “motivation and reward.”

    When confronted with photos of those who had jilted them, the subjects’ brains also responded in regions known as the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex. These parts of the brain are typically associated with intense addiction to cocaine and addiction to cigarettes. The researchers believe that the brain’s response to romantic rejection may have an evolutionary basis.

This word game helps predict lovers’ split

    Researchers have developed a word game that can help tell whether a romantic relationship is heading for a split. University of Rochester researchers used a so-called implicit task, which shows how lovers automatically respond to words: In this case, whether they find it easier to link words referring to their partner to words with pleasant or unpleasant meanings.