Helen E. Fisher, a biological anthropologist who went looking for love in the brain circuitry of people who were besotted as well as people who were rejected, and whose research into love led to a role as the chief science adviser to the dating service Match.com, died on Saturday at her husband’s home in the Bronx. She was 79.
John Tierney, her husband, said the cause was endometrial cancer. Dr. Fisher split her time between her husband’s apartment and hers in Manhattan.
“Around the world, people love,” Dr. Fisher said in a 2008 TED Talk. “They sing for love, they dance for love, they compose poems and stories about love. They tell myths and legends about love. They pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love and they die for love.”
Dr. Fisher had already been studying sexual behavior formore than 20 years, but she believed that there was an undiscovered scientific basis for love, an intense, often irrational, human mating drive.
“People have resisted thinking that romantic love actually is a brain system,” she said on the NPR program “TED Radio Hour” in 2014. “They’re scared that it will break the magic. They want romantic love to be part of the supernatural.” She added: “Why do we want to feel that it’s supernatural? ’Cause it feels so good.”
She and two collaborators used magnetic resonance scanners to detect increases and decreases in blood flow — indications of neural activity — in the brains of 17 college students in the throes of new love. Their research confirmed for the first time that love is hard-wired in the brain.
Published in 2005, their study was the first to identify regions of the brain — such as the ventral tegmental area, where dopamine is generated as part of a reward system — with early-stage romantic love.
The students were shown pictures of their beloveds and, as a control, images of familiar faces. Only the images of their new loves lit up the ventral tegmental area.
“The system is associated with drives like hunger and thirst, and with cocaine addiction,” Lucy Brown, one of Dr. Fisher’s collaborators, said in an interview. And, Dr. Brown, a clinical professor in neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, added, “It appears early in evolution, providing evidence to support her original ideas about love.”
Their study, which appeared in The Journal of Neurophysiology, was praised by a skeptical observer: Dr. Hans Breiter, director of the Motivation and Emotion Neuroscience Collaboration at Massachusetts General Hospital.
“I distrust about 95 percent of the M.R.I. literature,” he told The New York Times, “and I would give this study an ‘A.’ It really moves the ball in terms of understanding infatuation love.”
A follow-up, published in the same journal five years later, examined the M.R.I. scans of 15 students who had recently been rejected by their partners (and who, because of their raw emotions, weren’t easily persuaded to enter the scanning tube). The tegmental area and other parts in the brain lit up even more than they did for people in the early stages of romantic love, Dr. Brown said, underscoring the subjects’ continued intense attachment to their former lovers.
Helen Elizabeth Fisher was born on May 31, 1945, in Manhattan. Her father, Roswell, was a publishing executive at Time Inc. Her mother, Helen (Greeff) Fisher, was a floral artist and the president of a chapter of the Garden Club of America in Connecticut.
She majored in anthropology and psychology at New York University and received a bachelor’s degree in 1968. At the University of Colorado, Boulder, she earned a master’s degree in anthropology, linguistics and archaeology in 1972 and a Ph.D in physical anthropology and other subjects in 1975.
Dr. Fisher went on to hold various positions. She was a research editor at Reader’s Digest General Books and a research associate in the anthropology departments of the New School for Social Research, the American Museum of Natural History and Rutgers University, where she also taught.
Her first book, “The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior” (1982), examined the development of human female sexuality and the nuclear family, as well as human language, religiosity and tool use.
A decade later, she published “Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce,” a study of human sexuality in cultures around the world that explored why people fall in love, marry, cheat and divorce. One of her more noteworthy findings was that divorce rates tended to peak early, around the fourth year of marriage.
“There was a clear pattern,” she told The Daily News of New York in 1993. “I found a four-year itch.”
Her marriage in 1968 to Joe Bergquist lasted less than a year. In addition to Mr. Tierney, a former columnist for The New York Times who wrote about her work long before they married in 2020, Dr. Fisher is survived by her twin sister, Lorna Vanparys; another sister, Audrey Redmond Bergschmidt; and a stepson, Luke Tierney.
Impressed by Dr. Fisher’s research, Match.com hired her in 2005 as its chief science adviser, in part to answer a question: Why do people fall in love with one person and not another? She developed a questionnaire, the Fisher Temperament Inventory, that separated personalities into categories based on four of the brain’s sub-chemical systems:
The creative and spontaneous traits of the Explorers are connected to the brain’s dopamine system. Builders are traditional and cautious — characteristics linked to the serotonin system. Directors are analytical, logical, decisive and tough-minded because of their links to the testosterone system. Members of the fourth group, the Negotiators, exhibit traits from the estrogen system, such as holistic, long-term and imaginative thinking.
Explorers tend to be attracted to other Explorers, as Builders are to other Builders, she found, while Directors are more likely to attract Negotiators, and vice versa.
Millions of people have answered the questionnaire over the course of a decade on Chemistry.com, a dating website created for her by Match.com.
In 2010, Dr. Fisher started an annual survey, Singles in America, for Match.com, in collaboration with the Kinsey Institute, where she was a research fellow. The survey asks a demographically representative sample of 5,200 singles — none drawn from Match.com — about their attitudes and behaviors. Although there were core questions, many of the survey’s queries changed from year to year, to explore different topics.
“It informs everything we do,” Amy Canaday, Match.com’s senior director of marketing, said in an interview. “We see how Gen Z dates differently, how men fall in love faster and differently from what people might assume, how older singles date and want to find that romantic connection more than anybody. You name it, it influences the way we think.”
Justin Garcia, the executive director of the Kinsey Institute, who collaborated with Dr. Fisher on the survey, said that she “understood the extraordinary power of human connection — not just romantic love, but what binds humans cross-culturally throughout the world and throughout time.”
Dr. Fisher’s three TED Talks on love — which attracted a total of more than 20 million views — were examples of her informed, charming and, at times, intense approach to presenting the history and science of love. Her 2008 talk included references to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, the Roman dramatist Terence, David Mamet and William Faulkner.
She also wrote books based on her continuing research, including “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (2004) and “Why Him? Why Her? Finding Real Love by Understanding Your Personality Type” (2009).
She submitted the manuscript for her forthcoming book, tentatively titled “Thinking Four Ways: How to Reach Anyone With Neuroscience,” five days before her death, her husband said.
“After she sent it in to her editor at Knopf,” Mr. Tierney wrote in an email, “she cheerfully told me: ‘My work is done. I’ve had a magical life and accomplished more than I ever expected. I’m ready to die.’”
