February 14 marks the special occasion i.e. Valentine’s Day for couples to celebrate love for each other through romantic gestures, gifts, flowers and other presents. The day is replete with stories of people who met their significant other in different interesting ways, with many finding their soul mate by experiencing love at first sight. The idea of love, at first sight, is tempting but then there arises a question can you fall in love with someone you have just met?
Yes, it is for real and a research paper on this topic was published by researcher Eliska Prochazkova. According to the research, attraction is predicted by synchrony in heart rate and skin conductance between partners, which are covert, unconscious and difficult to regulate. This attraction level between partners keeps increasing and decreasing as their subconscious arousal levels rise and fall in synchrony. To reach this conclusion, researchers conducted what they called a blind date experiment. Participants were given eye-tracking glasses with embedded cameras and devices to measure physiological signals including heart rate and skin conductance.
To find out about this feeling of synchrony, researchers built a dating laboratory outside the regular laboratory setting. It was built in such a manner that meeting a new person was natural at different social events. For this experiment, males and females (140 participants), who were unknown to each other entered the dating cabin and sat at a table.
A visual barrier initially obstructed their view of each other, but then opened for three seconds, allowing them to form a first impression of their partner. The barrier then closed, and participants rated their partner on attraction (0–9 point scale). The heartbeats of only a few couples could be seen synchronising with each other.
In this experiment, researchers hypothesised that if true feelings of attraction exist between partners, there will be a physical manifestation of that as well i.e. subtle changes in face and body. That physical manifestation will eventually lead to psychological synchrony as well. It is this psychological synchrony which plays a crucial role in bonding between partners. This psychological synchrony increases as both partners develop a feeling of familiarity and spend intimate time with each other i.e. direct eye contact. As stated in the research, in couples, this psychological synchrony elevates as the amount of time they spend together increases.
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