The physical pain and intense feelings caused by social rejection “hurt” us in the same way, according to researchers from the University of Michigan (USA) reveal today in the journalProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences(PNAS). The study shows that lthe same brain regions that respond to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.
“These results give new meaning to the idea thatsocial rejection does ‘harm’“explains Ethan Cross, psychologist and lead author of the article.” Spilling a cup of hot coffee on it, and thinking about the rejection we feel when looking at a photograph of a person with whom we have recently broken a relationship involuntarily, causes kinds of pain very different, “he adds.
To reach this conclusion, Cross and her colleagues recruited 40 people who had suffered a breakup in the past six months, and who reported that when they thought about their experience of the breakup, they felt intensely rejected. Each participant completed two tasks in the study, one related to their feelings of rejection and another in which a painful but tolerable stimulus was generated similar to holding a cup of hot coffee. tasks while undergoing functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans.
“We found that strong feelings of social rejection activated regions of the brain that are involved in the sensation of physical pain, and that were rarely activated in neuroimaging studies of emotion,” Cross noted. Specifically, both the painful experience and the social rejection put into playneurons of the secondary somatosensory cortex and posterior dorsal insula.
The authors note that the results support popular wisdom, as similar terms are used in virtually all cultures –“pain”, “hurt”, “hurt”…- to describe the experiences of physical pain and those of social rejection.
