The study inspired a new line of research on neural similarities between social and physical pain. (The brain might have recognized this exclusion as accidental, and therefore not painful enough to merit corrective measures.) During explicit social exclusion, however, both ACC and RVPFC activity increased in participants. When Eisenberger and colleagues analyzed the neural images of exclusion, they discovered “a pattern of activations very similar to those found in studies of physical pain.” During implicit exclusion, the ACC acted up while the RVPFC stayed at normal levels. In these cases, the computer players included the participant for seven tosses, then kept the ball away for the next 45 throws. They watched as the other two players tossed the virtual ball, but were told that technical difficulties had prevented them from joining the fun. Some test participants experienced “implicit” exclusion during the game. In actuality, the other players were computer presets controlled by the researchers. Participants were under the impression that two other people would be playing as well. They decided to induce social pain in test participants to see how those areas responded.Įisenberger and colleagues fed participants into a brain imaging machine and hooked them into a game called Cyberball - essentially a game of virtual catch. The researchers knew which areas of the brain became active during physical pain: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which serves as an alarm for distress, and the right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC), which regulates it. The concept was hard to test in people, however, until the rise of neuroimaging decades later.Ī breakthrough occurred in an fMRI study led by APS Fellow Naomi Eisenberger of University of California, Los Angeles. Panksepp’s findings on social distress were replicated in a number of other species - monkeys, guinea pigs, rats, chickens. The study’s implication was profound: If an opiate could dull emotional angst, perhaps the brain processed social and physical pain in similar ways. The infant dogs cried when they were separated from their mothers, but these distress calls were much less intense in those that had been given a low dose of morphine, Panksepp reported in Biological Psychiatry. APS Fellow Jaak Panksepp, an animal researcher, was studying social attachment in puppies. Hints of a neural tie between social and physical pain emerged, quite unexpectedly, in the late 1970s. Love may actually hurt, like hurt hurt, after all. The connection is so strong that traditional bodily painkillers seem capable of relieving our emotional wounds. Neuroimaging studies have shown that brain regions involved in processing physical pain overlap considerably with those tied to social anguish. In the past few years, psychology researchers have found a good deal of literal truth embedded in the metaphorical phrases comparing love to pain. The problem is technically known as “stress cardiomyopathy,” but the press likes to call it “broken heart syndrome,” and medical professionals don’t object to the nickname.īehavioral science is catching up with the anecdotes, too. A few years ago a group of doctors at Johns Hopkins University reported a rare but lethal heart condition caused by acute emotional distress. Truth is you don’t have to be a sentimentalist to believe in broken hearts - being a subscriber to the New England Journal of Medicine will do. In one example from early 2012, Marjorie and James Landis of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, who’d been married for 65 years, died just 88 minutes apart. Old couples frequently make the news because they can’t physically survive without one another. At the same time, life often presents a compelling argument that the two types of pain share a common source. We agree that “love hurts,” but we don’t think it hurts the way that, say, being kicked in the shin hurts. Most of us see the connection between social and physical pain as a figurative one.