Those who have experienced going through serious heartbreak may be inclined to rank it as one of the most emotionally painful moments of their lives. But is it painful in the same way that something physical is? The National Academy of Sciences published a study earlier this week that states that the two types of pain register in a similar manner within the brain.
The researchers brought in 40 participants who felt intensely rejected after a recent breakup. They had to perform two tasks while inside the fMRI scanner. One was a social rejection task in which they were shown a picture of their former boyfriend or girlfriend and were told to think about the rejection. The other was a physical pain task where the left arm was subjected to an uncomfortable amount of heat. These two sets of data were compared to each other as well as a control task in which the subjects either viewed a picture of a friend and thought of a happy experience with them or felt a warm stimulus on their arm.
The results showed that the more extreme social and physical stimuli both led to the activation of the pain regions of the brain as well as a few other similar areas. From this, we get an idea of how the brain can deal with non-physical pain. The gathered data allowed the researchers to form the new hypothesis that social hurt has become more involved with the pain regions of the brain through evolution and as more social animals, like humans, began to appear. This also laid a deeper ground of understanding why somatoform disorders (i.e. feeling nonexistent pain) occur in certain cases.
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