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"When you're rejected in love, we still find activity in the VTA — you're still madly in love with that person, after all," she says. "But we also find elevated
activity in other brain regions linked with craving, and in a part of the brain associated with the distress that goes along with physical pain."

Rejected lovers, in other words, appear to retain the same
obsessive focus on their object of desire, but are unable to
have it fulfilled. One positive aspect of the study, though, was
that the more time that had passed since the participants'
rejection, the lower activity was in another brain region
associated with attachment.

Scans of people rejected in love revealed elevated activity in the anterior cingulate (left arrow in image F)
and the insular cortex (right arrow in G), both areas associated with physical pain. (Fisher et. al. 2010)

5. Long-term attachment is neurologically different from early-stage love

Fisher and other researchers distinguish between these successive phases of love for a good reason — in terms of both behaviour and brain activity, they look
somewhat different.

Her fMRI studies of couples who'd been happily married for decades found that, when they looked at photos each other, activity increased in brain areas
distinct from those identified in the study of new lovers. Activity was elevated in the VTA — just like in new lovers — but also the ventral pallidum, an area
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associated with maternal attachment in animal studies.