“Heartache may be more than just a metaphor. People feel the pain of rejection, exclusion, and loss with some of the same physiological machinery that they use to feel the pain of touching a hot stove, report researchers Geoff MacDonald of the University of Queensland and Mark R. Leary of Wake Forest University. As a result, says MacDonald, “Feeling socially supported is crucial not just to mental health, but also to physical health.
People with AIDS, for example, not only have to deal with the physical pain caused by the disease, but also the social pain caused by its stigma. Lessening their isolation can make a big difference to patients’ physical health. “I have seen people start to carry their bodies differently, say they feel physically better, and report that they have more energy after attending a support group for several months, says Mickie Robbins, program manager of mental health services at AIDS Project Los Angeles.
Physical and social pain don’t follow the exact same circuitry. Instead, what they have in common is how we feel about them: The emotional experience of physical pain and the emotional experience of social exclusion travel the same wires. A part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex processes the unpleasantness of physical pain. In functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain, that very part also lights up when you’re playing computer-simulated catch but no one will throw you the ball.
In their article published in the March issue of Psychological Bulletin, the researchers also report animal studies showing the social-physical pain connection (yes, rats feel social pain, too). A rat pup crying for its mother uses the same part of the brain that it uses to process physical pain. That part, the periaqueductal gray, is at the center of the most basic fight-or-flight responses in all mammals.
In addition, aspects of the fightor- flight response, like aggression and decreased sensitivity to pain, can be brought on by both physical threats and social isolation. Wounded animals and people alike often lash out in response to physical pain. Counterproductively, we also lash out in response to social pain. In one experiment, human research participants who were told that they would have a lonely future responded by blasting noise at the people around them.
Both physical and social pain can also have analgesic effects. Soldiers may be slow to notice a gunshot wound, and people whose feelings are easily hurt don’t pay attention to physical pain while they are being left out of a game. Over the long term, though, social support is the better anesthetic, with more support being associated with lower levels of chronic pain, labor pain, cardiac pain, and postoperative pain.
MacDonald and Leary suggest that this remarkable pairing of social and physical pain is the result of our evolution. In environments where social exclusion meant death, a system that tied rejection to physical pain could have been favored by natural selection. In other words, our ancestors who responded to social snubs as mortal threats might have been more likely to live and reproduce than were their less painfully standoffish cousins. Over generations, everyone would come to experience exclusion as hurtful.
“We are social animals, concludes MacDonald. “We desperately, literally, need each other. And we ignore that at our own peril.
Read more stories by Jessica Ruvinsky.