Wondering if your partner is cheating on you is one of the worst feelings in the world. Sometimes you’d rather not know, just to save yourself the heartache. Relationships are hard enough, but having to add a conversation about infidelity? Yikes, hello, emotional roller coaster.
Many have gone through the difficult moments of piecing together the stomach-origin mystery and wondering if your loved one is just stressed after a hard day or secretly lying to you with each passing moment.
It would be so much easier if there was a scientific way to get the truth out. (And one that doesn’t just involve guesswork, although there is some red flags to watch out for.) It turns out scientists assume that people who cheat have identifiably different brain chemistry than people who are faithful to their partners.
The truly tragic way cheating changes your brain, according to research
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The study compared brain activity in monogamous and non-monogamous men
They showed both sets of men pictures while they scanned their brains with an fMRI machine. As part of the investigation the researchers showed each group of men (one group who identified as monogamous, one group who identified as non-monogamous) romantic and scandalous images and recorded which areas of the brain were activated.
When shown romantic images, monogamous men’s brains light up on the right side, including their orbitofrontal cortex, which is associated with decision-making. But the brain off all subjects in both groups responded similarly when shown the other images, suggesting that only feelings of romance change when a subject identifies as non-monogamous.
“Results indicated that monogamous men showed more reward-related neural activity when viewing romantic images compared to non-monogamous men,” say researchers behind the study. “These findings show that the neural processing of romantic images is different for monogamous and non-monogamous men.”
It is important to note that, as with any scientific study, more research is needed before the underlying hypothesis can be proven, and the study included 20 men, so the size of participation must be considered.
The study also did not account for polyamorous relationships and did not ask whether subjects were unfaithful
The study only accounted for the fact that non-monogamous individuals saw more than one partner. It would be nice if there was a way to wear an fMRI machine to check for signs of cheating, but this is more of an episode of Black mirror than real-life tech.
Instead of hopefully open communication will help filter out some of the confusion, and if nothing else, your instincts might be able to point you in the right direction.
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