Homeostatic circuits, including those for social bonding, typically consist of a detector, a control center, and an effector.

“Every homeostatic circuit has three components or at least three. One is a detector, meaning the organism or the thermostat on your wall has to have some way of detecting what's going on in the environment. All right? In the context of social bonding, whether or not you are interacting with others and whether or not those interactions are going well. So that has to be detected. That's the first thing. Then there has to be a control center. That's the second thing. And the control center is the one that makes the adjustments to in the case of social bonding to your behavior and to your psychology. Now the third component of this homeostatic circuit is the aector. The aector is actually what drives the behavioral response.”