Lawrence resident Hillary Leiker and her boyfriend Shay Choudhury have been dating on and off for four years. Each time they broke up, she said she never wanted to completely end communication with him because she never stopped caring about him.

“I tried to hate him just to get over it, but it never worked out that way,” Leiker said. “I knew I could never live without him. I could spend every day with him and never get sick of it. We’d probably get on each other’s nerves, but I wouldn’t mind it at all.”

Leiker’s desire to be around Choudhury may have a deep-rooted psychological foundation, according to new research that suggests that a person being dumped experiences brain activity akin to kicking an addiction.

The study, conducted by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, used a functional MRI scanner to examine the brain activity of subjects who had recently experienced romantic rejection. Fifteen college-aged adults who still had feelings for long-term partners were examined while looking at photos of their exes, then neutral images.

The familiar images triggered specific areas of the brain including the ventral tegmental area, which is related to motivation, reward and feelings of romantic love; the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal corte, related to craving and addiction; and the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate, related to physical pain and distress.

“Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a natural addiction,” Lucy Brown, professor of neuroscience and neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a press release for the college. “Our findings suggest the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology. A natural recovery, to pair up with someone else, is in our physiology, too.”

Brown said that understanding this innate function can help people recovering from break up to engage in similarly positive social behavior, similar to people recovering from addiction. Despite the recent findings though, many researchers hesitate to accept the findings at face value.

“The fact that an area like the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex lights up doesn’t necessarily mean that going through breakups have the same effects like cocaine withdrawal,” said Omri Gillath, assistant professor of social psychology. “These areas are related to various other functions, including motivation, thought and emotion control, self-reflection and so on.”

He said that he wouldn’t be surprised if the pain associated with breakup revealed similar brain activation patterns to pain associated with withdrawal, but it was still a far stretch to call love an addiction and break-up like withdrawal.

Jeffery Hall, assistant professor of communications studies, said that going through a break-up could elicit very strong emotions and it made sense that the body and brain would react. He said to recover emotionally, it was important to establish a boundary and stick by it.

“The problem is that people tend to think that they’re being clear about what they’re saying when they say ‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ but then they try to have a conversation, text message, or keep in contact with that person, which sends very unclear messages,” Hall said.

Hall said that on-again-off-again relationships were very common in college communities, and that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“The reason we get back together with somebody and the reason we have a hard time breaking up with them is that the security, comfort and familiarity that that relationship offers us is really appealing,” Hall said. “There’s a big difference between wanting clarity and security, and addiction.”

After almost two years in a relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Lauren Oberzan decided to act on her instincts and move on, no matter how hard it was.

“My friends were really supportive of my decision and that definitely helped,” Oberzan said. “But I still had to keep myself really busy to keep my mind off of it.”

Brown told Time Magazine that the pain might be a good thing because avoiding negative feelings encouraged us to maintain long-term, positive relationships through adverse circumstances. It may also, however, lead us to continue pursuing negative relationships or interactions.

Sarah Kirk, director of the KU Psychological Clinic, said that spending time with your social support network was of the most important in order to move on. Kirk said that some people were able to maintain healthy friendships with their exes, but others engaging in negative interactions need to be aware that they should stop communicating with the person altogether.

“One thing we hear a lot from students is that even though there’s a break up, with today’s technology, they still continue to track them through Facebook or continue to text back and forth,” Kirk said. “If you continue to engage with that person, it might prolong some of those negative feelings, rather than setting the limit that you’re not going to receive text messages from each other any more.”