Mismatch negativity tells you how much you automatically care for your lover's love

Understanding the automatic process of love oriented to a participant by his or her own lover helps to build a normal loving relationship. It also helps to elucidate some of the underlying mechanisms of pathological love, which involves both repetitive and uncontrolled attention and care. Previous studies have addressed the late-stage process of love, but its early or automatic stage has been studied less. When processing a change in speech from "love" to "love you" from their own lover, participants showed a more prefrontal-frontal distribution of cerebral mismatch negativity. Source analysis showed that the left superior temporal gyrus was involved in all participants. The right inferior frontal gyrus was additionally involved in some participants who evaluated love as more intense. Brain areas activated in process might inversely indicate how much a participant cares about the love oriented by their lover.