Helen Fisher, scientist who scanned the brains of people in love and the brokenhearted

She likened dopamine-driven romantic love to ‘someone camping out in your head’, with mood swings, high energy and separation anxiety

Helen Fisher, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a biological anthropologist who researched the chemical nature of human love in all its shapes and forms, by scanning the brains of people in love, and distilled her conclusions in a series of bestselling books.
Love, she concluded, comes in three flavours: lust, romantic love and long-term attachment. There is some overlap but, in essence, these are separate phenomena, with their own chemical triggers and motivational systems which have evolved to enable, respectively, mating, pair-bonding and parenting.
It was the second of these categories, romantic love – the obsessive attachment to another person – that particularly interested Helen Fisher. “We know quite a lot about sex drive, which is associated with very high levels of testosterone,” she told the Guardian in 2005, “and there are plenty of scientists looking into oxytocin and vasopressin, two of the neurotransmitters behind attachment, but I wanted to know what was behind romantic love.”
The feeling of being in love, she said, was like “someone camping out in your head” characterised by obsessively-focused attention, mood swings, high levels of energy and separation anxiety. These, she hypothesised, were all symptoms of elevated levels of dopamine – the “reward” chemical.
To investigate her hypothesis, Helen Fisher and her colleagues scanned the brains of 17 college students, men and women, who claimed to be newly and madly in love. When she showed them photographs of their loved ones, the areas of the brain that produce and receive dopamine, notably the ventral tegmental area, lit up. Similar brain areas light up during the rush of euphoria after taking cocaine.
Romantic love, she concluded, is a drive rather than an emotion – a potent chemical kick to set you moving towards reproduction: “It enables us to focus our energies on one person, thereby conserving courtship time.”
But when she later scanned the brains of 15 students who had recently been dumped, she found a more worrying story. The dopamine receptor areas lit up even more than they did for people in the early stages of romantic love, but there was also activity in parts of the brain associated with risk-taking, physical pain, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, anger and theory of mind (imagining what the other person is thinking).
“It made me understand a little bit more about why people become so depressed,” she told the Independent. “You’re intensely in love, you have just been rejected, but you are still in love, if not even more so, and you are willing to take enormous risks… You are obsessing about this person, you are trying to control your anger and you’re trying to evaluate what to do next. You are in a very uncomfortable state. No wonder so many crimes of passion take place.”
Romantic love, she concluded, is much more powerful than lust and is very difficult to control. “After all,” she said, “if you casually ask someone to go to bed with you and they refuse, you don’t slip into a depression, commit suicide or homicide – but around the world people suffer terribly from romantic rejection.”
Helen Fisher went on to publicise her research in a series of TED talks, watched by more than 21 million viewers, and in 2005 the dating site Match.com appointed her its chief science adviser.
She developed a questionnaire, the Fisher Temperament Inventory, to which some six million people responded. From this she concluded that there are four basic personality types, which are controlled by different chemicals in the brain and influence how we are attracted to others: The Explorer, a sensation-seeker, is ruled by dopamine; the Builder, a cautious respecter of authority, is driven by serotonin; the Director, self-confident and analytical, is ruled by testosterone; and the Negotiator, intuitive and consensual, is fired by oestrogen.
She found that Explorers tend to be attracted to other Explorers, Builders to other Builders, while Directors are more likely to attract Negotiators, and vice versa.
In 2010 she launched an annual survey, Singles in America, for Match.com, in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute, of which she was a senior research fellow, in which 5,200 single people were asked about their attitudes to love and sex, and sexual behaviour.
One conclusion from the survey was that casual sex was helping single people to find more compatible partners. Freed from many of the sanctions around pre-marital sex but wary of the fallout from divorce, people were increasingly looking to make a connection with a partner quickly and then to commit slowly.
“We are incorporating a long precommitment stage into the courtship process and fast sex is part of that. It means I’m interested in you, and I want to know what you’re really like, and if it’s worth taking this any further,” Helen Fisher explained. “You get to know a lot about somebody very quickly from sleeping with them.”
A spokeman for Match.com has said that Helen Fisher’s research “informs everything we do’’.
One of identical twins, Helen Elizabeth Fisher was born on May 31 1945 in Connecticut to Roswell Fisher, a publishing executive, and Helen, née Greeff, a floral artist.
After a degree in anthropology and psychology at New York University, she took a master’s degree and PhD at the University of Colorado, Boulder.
She worked at various times as a research editor at Reader’s Digest General Books and research associate in anthropology at the New School for Social Research, the American Museum of Natural History and Rutgers University.
Her first book, The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior (1982), examined the development of human female sexuality and the nuclear family. In 1992 she published Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce, in which, among other things, she found that divorce rates tended to peak around the fourth year of marriage.
Her other books include Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) and Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type (2009).
Helen Fisher was briefly married in her early twenties and had several long-term relationships before 2020 when she married John Tierney. He survives her with a stepson.
Helen Fisher, born May 31 1945, died August 17 2024