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Love 'puts blinders on people'
4 March 2008
Being in love with someone can limit the power that very attractive people have over you, according to a new scientific study.
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Research conducted at UCLA revealed that love can help people to resist temptation.
The study involved carrying out an experiment on college students in long-term relationships and found that asking people to comment on how much they loved their boyfriend or girlfriend limited the appeal of other very good looking people.
Gian Gonzaga, lead author of the study, said: "Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways by in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind."
Martie Haselton, a professor of psychology at UCLA, said that it is almost as if love "puts blinders on people".
As part of the study, the undergraduates had to look at photos of attractive members of society as taken from website Hot or Not and also write essays on three subjects.
The first was the time they have felt the most sexual desire for their partner, the time they have felt the most love for them or anything else they want to write about. They were told to put the attractive other out of their mind while writing the essay.
Professor Haselton said: "People in the love group found it easy to push an attractive other out of their mind even though we made those thoughts tempting."
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