\u201cRejection is such a powerful experience for people,\u201d Eisenberger says. \u201cIf you ask people to think back about some of their earliest negative experiences, they will often be about rejection, about being picked last for a team or left out of some social group.\u201d People talk about hurt feelings and broken hearts, but Eisenberger realized they might be onto something when she and a colleague noticed how similar their images of brain activity looked in people who had experienced social rejection and others who had experienced physical pain<\/strong>. \u201cWe were sitting next to each other and noticed how similar the two brain images looked,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n That similarity has held up in later research. Physical pain and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain<\/strong>. Physical pain has two aspects: the sensory experience of pain and the emotional component, in which your brain decides how negative or distressing the pain is. It is the latter that is shared with social pain, although some research has suggested that severe social rejection, like being dumped, can also be processed in the part of your brain that handles the sensory component of pain.<\/p>\n People who are more sensitive to physical pain are also more sensitive to social pain<\/strong>; they feel more rejected after completing a social exclusion task, in which the other two players in a computer version of catch refuse to share the ball. One study even found that people who took Tylenol for three weeks reported less hurt feelings than people who took a placebo. Even Eisenberger was surprised by that. \u201cIt follows in a logical way from the argument that the physical and social pain systems overlap, but it\u2019s still kind of hard to imagine,\u201d she says. \u201cWe take Tylenol for physical pain; it\u2019s not supposed<\/em> to work on social pain.\u201d<\/p>\n Eisenberger does not recommend taking painkillers so you don\u2019t feel social pain. And, besides, there may be value to experiencing the pain of rejection.\u00a0 \u201cI think it\u2019s probably there for a reason\u2014to keep us connected to others,\u201d she says. \u201cIf we\u2019re constantly numbing the feeling of social rejection, are we going to be more likely do things that get us rejected, that alienate us?\u201d There may be some cases where the social pain is too much, though; future research may look at whether it should sometimes be treated.<\/p>\n The research validates the hurt feelings of people who have been socially rejected, Eisenberger says. \u201cWe seem to hold physical pain in higher regard than social pain,\u201d she says. While bystanders understand that physical pain hurts and can be debilitating, the same empathy doesn\u2019t always extend to people feeling social pain. \u201cThe research is sort of validating. It suggests that there is something real about this experience of pain that we have following rejection and exclusion<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: \u201cBroken-hearted\u201d isn\u2019t just a metaphor\u2014social pain and physical pain have a lot in common, according to Naomi Eisenberger of the University of… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,10,6],"tags":[42,190,12,98],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1515"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1515\/revisions\/1517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/BrokenHeart.jpg\" "\\"broken")
\u201cBroken-hearted\u201d isn\u2019t just a metaphor\u2014social pain and physical pain have a lot in common<\/strong>, according to Naomi Eisenberger of the University of Califiornia-Los Angeles, the author of a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the paper, she surveys recent research on the overlap between physical and social pain.<\/p>\n