Image source @ Visual China
Wen 丨 academic headlines, author 丨 green apple, editor 丨 Huang Shan
You slowly close your eyes and imagine these scenarios in your life: the company team fired you; seeing a friend in the circle of friends hosting a party without inviting you; meeting your ex at a restaurant and someone enjoying a romantic dinner together...
The rejection signal released by these social scenes is more or less to make you feel "hurt feelings", and whether it has brought you those "net suppression cloud" moments.
So, which of this "heartbreak" in our social interactions is more painful than the physical trauma?
Scientific research has revealed the answer. For now, scientists are not only able to map the very real process behind the two, but also reveal how similar they are.
Obviously, all of these forms of social pain have a potentially harmful nature.
Recently, Geoff MacDonald from the University of Queensland and Mark R. Leary from Wake Forest University jointly published an article titled "Why Does Social Exclusion Hurt?" The Relationship Between Social and Physical Pain" paper, which aims to link social pain more strongly to the human response to perceived social rejection and consider the impact of social pain on important issues such as relationship aggression and pain disorders.
In this paper, the authors use the term social pain to refer to a specific emotional response when a person is excluded from an ideal relationship, or belittled by an ideal relationship partner or group, and makes the hypothesis that social rejection is painful because the rejection response is regulated by various aspects of the body's pain system.
The context of the article is clear, first showing the theory that the overlap between social pain and physical pain is actually an evolutionary development in response to threats. The article then cites a series of evidence that humans exhibit a fusion between the two types of pain in thought, emotion, and behavior, with social pain and physical pain having common physiological mechanisms; finally, the article explores the effects of social pain theory on rejection-induced attacks and physical pain disorders.
Social pain and physical pain are inextricably linked
The brain responds to social pain in a particularly similar way to dealing with physical pain, which they see as an evolutionary response.
The social pain theory is based on the idea that the possibility of separation from important social entities poses a major challenge to the survival of our ancestors, which can be traced back at least to the earliest mammals, or even earlier.
For early humans, if you succeed in being part of a group, you can get more security and resources, and if you are rejected by the group, you are bound to become vulnerable and isolated.
As a result, humans evolved to seek social acceptance while viewing social rejection as a threat to happiness. Furthermore, people have to associate exclusion with suffering in order to motivate themselves at all times and to protect themselves from the threat of social relations.
This means that the pain of being fired, breaking up and breaking up is very real. Similar to physical pain, the same areas of the brain also record social pain. Scientists have determined that there is a clear overlap between physical pain and social pain.
In both cases, pain activation is designed to trigger self-avoidance behavior or, in the case of self-induced pain, to discourage harmful behavior.
Painful memories then turn into warnings to prevent the recurrence of this risky behavior in the future. While memory of physical pain subsides, studies have found that unlike social pain, social pain persists over time and is reactivated as memory triggers.
Map different types of pain
The study used the term "social exclusion" to unify rejection and ostracization.
Source: Oxford
Rejection is often defined as conveying to you that you don't accept or don't need it, often in sad situations such as love, interpersonal interactions, and career endeavors. At the same time, "exclusion" refers to being excluded, ignored or separated from a group. Through these two categories, social scientists have also seen the emergence of sub-phenomena such as discrimination, dehumanization and social isolation.
So, what are the painful manifestations of social exclusion?
Scientists in the early 20th century pointed out that people often used physical pain to express their experience of social exclusion: a breakup was described as a feeling of "heartbreak," while betrayal was like being stabbed in the back or kicked in the stomach.
In the early 1990s, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) appeared, allowing scientists to map brain activity by measuring blood flow. The increase in blood flow indicates that a certain part of the brain is being "occupied," which can help researchers observe which parts of the brain are activated when the body is in pain.
In the 21st century, scientists finally have the opportunity to experiment with the different ways in which the brain is activated during social exclusion. The results confirm that the description of painful sensations is more than a mere artistic exaggeration: brain regions that are activated during physical pain are also activated in the case of social exclusion.
Virtual social, real pain
Some studies have also pointed out that the feeling of emotional injury in humans is actually not very high.
A person does not even need the stimulation of a real being to flood the sentimentality of those who do not want to recall. In a 2003 study published in the journal Science, researchers connected participants to fMRIs to see how they responded to virtual social snubs.
In the simulation, the participants play a catch-and-receive game with two virtual players. Soon, virtual players excluded participants and began to toss only coins at each other. The virtual player wasn't even real, but the participants' fMRIs showed that during this exclusion process, blood flow to the anterior cingulate Cortex (ACC), which records physical pain, increased and became more active.
Thus, the authors conclude that the right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC), which is involved in dealing with risk and fear, helps regulate the pain of social exclusion by disrupting the ACC.
A person may forget about being ostracized by a virtual snob, but because of the pain they have suffered in real life, it often takes a long time to dissipate.
In one study, 40 respondents experienced abandonment by a loved one in the past 6 months, i.e. a failed relationship. The participants agreed that they had suffered a "strong rejection", and then during the experiment, the researchers connected them to the fMRI scanner.
The researchers then applied stimuli to the participants, such as mild physical pain (a hot touch in their left arm) and photos of friends. And when a photo of their ex appears on the screen, they are forced to recall the scene when they broke up.
Sure enough, the scans showed that physical pain and social pain overlapped on the nervous system. The study concluded that "social rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are both painful, but that they also share common manifestations in the brain's somatosensory system."
Can paracetamol "relieve pain"?
The overlap between physical pain and social pain is so pronounced that scientists have found that social pain can also be treated with acetaminophen.
In one study, some participants took Tylenol daily, while others took a placebo for three weeks.
FMRI scans showed that those who took Tylenol had a decreased response to social rejection.
However, the authors also point out that social exclusion is a natural part of everyday life, that social pain is only one aspect of a broader emotional mechanism, and therefore that using paracetamol to "relieve pain" is only a short-term solution.
Of course, while existing studies clearly point to the link between social and physical pain, it also highlights some glaring differences that require further attention.
What needs to be further confirmed in future studies is to repeat the results of the experiment in human participants and help understand the mechanisms by which social status perception affects pain sensitivity; to study the specific mechanisms by which social conditions affect pain sensitivity.