Love. It's not just something that's in the air. Scientists tell us it's also in the brain — an instinct more deeply ingrained than language itself.

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Romantic love — i.e., the act of falling in love, not to be confused with that other basic instinct, lust — is a primal emotion as basic as fear and anger, says Vanderbilt University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Edward Fischer. Long thought of as a notion invented by Western cultures, romantic love is a human universal, found in cultures around the world, said Fischer.

Fischer and his research partner William Jankowiak of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas looked for evidence of romantic love in a sample of 166 cultures from around the world and found that romantic love was present in 88.5 percent of those cultures.

The view that romantic love is universal is supported by neurological and biochemical research into the brain's functioning. When we fall in love, the brain produces increased amounts of phenylethlylamine (PEA) and dopamine, which produce feelings of euphoria and elation — chemicals that may have evolved to encourage pair bonding in human beings in our early evolutionary history.

Not all cultures experience romantic love the same way, however; in some cultures, it is suppressed or muted, while in others, like ours, it is a dominant cultural ideal. But the fact remains that love is everywhere.

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