American Psychological Association. APA Dictionary of Psychology. Still, others draw a distinction between primary and secondary emotions and put love in the latter category, maintaining that it derives from a mix of primary emotions. In a groundbreaking experiment, Fisher and colleagues at Stony Brook University in New York state put 37 people who were madly in love into an MRI scanner. Their work showed that romantic love causes a surge of activity in brain areas that are rich in dopamine, the brain’s feelgood chemical. These included the caudate nucleus, part of the reward system, and an ancient brain area called the ventral tegmental area, or VTA.
