We all love something, be it a person, a pet, a painting, a song. But there’s little academic consensus on what ‘love’ means. 

Despite millennia of philosophical exploration on the experience, psychologists and neuroscientists have tended to focus on just two kinds: romantic love and parental love. So, to what extent broader models of love relate to people’s actual experiences has not been clear. 

Now, a new research by Pärttyli Rinne and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, helps to find an answer. In their work, the team reports the first systematic investigation of how people feel different forms of love in their body. Expanding beyond romantic and parental love, this work highlights the many different types of love humans are capable of, and suggests that love types sit on a continuum of strength of emotional feeling.

The team found also clear differences in the strength of bodily sensations associated with different types of love. Passionate love and true love were reported to have the most intense sensations. Other types were felt less strongly, with moral love and practical love coming in as the weakest. 

The paper was published in Philosophical Psychology.