Love Is All Around (the University of Utah)
Love Is All Around (the University of Utah)
A Valentine’s Day message from the AVPR’s Desk
This Valentine’s Day arrives with a new and visible symbol of connection on campus: the iconic LOVE sculpture by Robert Indiana, recently installed near the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. The sculpture offers a timely reminder that love—so often treated as private or sentimental—is also public, shared, and deeply human. Across the University of Utah, faculty and students are studying love, emotion, empathy, and care in rigorous, creative, and surprising ways. Together, these efforts show that love is not only something we feel, but something we investigate, practice, and sustain through research and creative scholarship.
Love and emotional life begin far earlier than adulthood. The Baby Affect and Behavior Study (BABY) explores how emotional regulation and affective behaviors emerge in infancy, offering insight into the earliest foundations of emotional experience. By examining how babies express, experience, and regulate emotion, this work helps researchers understand how the capacity for connection, comfort, and emotional attunement develops from the very beginning. These early processes form the groundwork for later experiences of attachment, care, and love—reminding us that emotion research spans the entire human lifespan.
As people grow, learning to manage and sustain emotion becomes essential. At the University of Utah, the Neuroscience of Emotion Regulation and Dysregulation (NERD) Lab investigates how individuals regulate emotion at the intersection of brain and behavior. Using behavioral measures, physiological data, and neuroimaging tools, researchers study both healthy regulation and dysregulation, illuminating how emotional balance is achieved—and disrupted—across contexts. This work helps explain how positive emotions such as love, joy, and hope are sustained over time, and why emotional regulation is critical for mental health and for maintaining stable, supportive relationships.
Love is not only an internal state—it is something we do for one another. That principle is at the heart of the Family Caregiving Collaborative, a major initiative led by the College of Nursing that studies the experiences, needs, and well-being of family caregivers. By examining the emotional, social, and health-related dimensions of caring for spouses, partners, parents, children, and other loved ones, this research makes visible the sustained, often unseen labor of love. It also informs interventions and policies that better support caregivers and the relationships at the center of their work.
Love is also studied through the lens of intimate partnership in the HEART Lab (Health & Adaptation in Relationships Team), where researchers examine how couples adapt to stressors both within and beyond their relationships. This work explores how relationship quality influences physical and psychological health, including outcomes in chronic disease contexts, and how couple-based interventions can improve well-being for both partners. By studying communication, support, and emotional responsiveness under conditions of stress, HEART Lab research demonstrates that close interpersonal relationships are not merely emotional experiences, but powerful determinants of health—highlighting love as a protective factor that shapes resilience, recovery, and long-term outcomes.
In the humanities, faculty investigate love through sustained acts of imagination and interpretation. A compelling example is The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager, which explores how love endures across time, memory, and absence. Set in a surreal landscape where time behaves unpredictably, the novel centers on a narrator haunted by a past relationship—often described as the only person she truly loved—whose presence continues to shape her emotional world long after the relationship itself has ended. Rather than offering a conventional romance, the novel examines love as a force that reorganizes perception and resists linear closure, demonstrating how creative scholarship functions as research into emotional life.
In the visual arts, love and emotional connection unfold through material, memory, and place. In her exhibition The Trees Will Love You and the Earth Will Hold You, Beth Krensky invites viewers into a contemplative world of ritual, remembrance, and belonging. Drawing on found objects and meditative practices, her work explores care not only between people, but between people and the environments they inhabit—reminding us that love can be collective, ecological, and deeply grounded in place.
From infancy to caregiving, from brain science to couple dynamics, storytelling, and visual art, the University of Utah is home to research and creative scholarship that takes love seriously. As the LOVE sculpture now stands on campus, it reflects not just a Valentine’s sentiment, but a shared commitment to understanding emotion, empathy, and care as essential parts of human—and scholarly—life.
Jakob D. Jensen
Associate Vice President for Research
University of Utah