University of Montana researchers delve into the science of love

MISSOULA – As love is celebrated this week on Valentine’s Day, researchers at the University of Montana are exploring the age-old question of what creates romantic connections.

“It’s interesting that this is one of the oldest questions in psychology and we still don’t really know the answer besides attractiveness,” said Stephanie Dimitroff, an assistant professor of social psychology. “But that’s not saying much. What is it that makes a person attractive?”

Dimitroff and students in the Biology of Stress and Sociality Lab are using speed dating as an ideal setting to explore how people connect and how their bodies respond to attraction.  

Dimitroff did a similar speed dating study in Germany while she completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Konstanz. Her focus was on physiological synchrony, the idea that people’s heart rates and other physical responses synchronize with those they admire.

While studying speed dating in Germany, Dimitroff’s team analyzed participants’ blood sugar to see how blood glucose levels would affect connections. Interestingly, the study results suggested people with lower blood glucose levels were rated as more likeable and attractive and got more matches.  

“That is exactly opposite of what I would have thought,” she said. “That study seemed far-fetched, and I didn’t want to publish it without replicating it. So that’s what the Missoula study was for.”

Last November and December, Dimitroff’s team invited 90 Missoula community members to participate in five speed dating events at the Missoula Public Library. Each event had between 15 to 20 people split up in age groups of 18-25 and 26-35. Half the participants were asked to fast before the event to arrive with lower blood glucose levels and the other half were given sugar water to ensure they had higher levels. 

The researchers tracked the participants’ personality types, attachment styles, levels of empathy and blood glucose levels throughout the study. Dimitroff and her team are still analyzing the findings, but they did discover some intriguing data. 

The five events led to 394 speed dates. Out of those dates, 65 of them were matches, meaning both people mutually liked each other and wanted to exchange contact information. That 16.5% success rate is the same proportion of matches in Dimitroff’s German study. 

“This suggests if you throw two similarly aged single strangers together on a date, there seems to be about a 16%-17% chance that they will mutually like each other,” she said. 

Dimitroff plans to dig deeper into the data and will do a six-month follow-up with the participants to see if any of the 65 matches became romantic relationships. 

Throughout her academic career, Dimitroff has had a deep curiosity about what it is that makes people like one another. 

“Dating is such an interesting topic and it’s something that we truly don’t understand, and that’s why it’s so rife with conflict, confusion and frustration,” she said. “At the end of the day, it is a physiological question. Our emotions, the way we respond to other people and the way somebody makes us feel, that’s a physiological process. I think looking at dating through a physiological lens is so fascinating.”

Jordan Gunderson, a first-year doctoral student working with Dimitroff in the Lab, is centering his master’s thesis around stress and being aware of your body’s own stress response signals. Helping with the speed dating experiments gave Gunderson a first-hand look at how people handle stress, and it was a perfect overlap in his research. 

“I was lucky that the [Biology of Stress and Sociality] Lab and Stephanie’s research aligned very closely with what I wanted to do,” he said. “It was a dream pairing for me and I’m happy to be here at UM doing good work.” 

Besides collecting data from the speed dating, Dimitroff also enjoyed hosting fun events for the community. She noticed participants becoming friends outside of the romantic matches. At one of the events, every participant started playing Rock, Paper, Scissors with others. 

“You could see they were all chit-chatting and becoming friends and talking to each other outside of the event,” she said. “I think it was a really nice way to meet people of similar ages in the community.” 

The large motivation behind Dimitroff’s work is to address loneliness in people, which studies have shown is more detrimental to longevity than smoking and obesity. 

“A big reason for the speed dating experiments is to try to find out what creates a connection,” she said. “What is it about people that make them likeable and is that something eventually we could apply to help lessen loneliness.”

    Stephanie Dimitroff and University of Montana doctoral student Jordan Gunderson practice testing blood glucose levels before a speed dating study at the Missoula Public Library.