Emotional and physical pain hurt the similar way

Memories of devastating heartbreaks appear to trigger an activity in the brain, which is similar to when people suffer physical pain. The study demonstrates that the same regions of the brain that become active in response to painful sensory experiences are activated during intense experiences of social rejection.

Previous research has shown a link between "socially induced pain" - the kind you get from dealing with other people - and physical pain. For the new study, the researchers looked at rejection specifically.

Researchers in the U.S. studied about 40 people who had experienced an unwanted romantic breakup in the past 6-months. Every participant claimed to feel rejected whenever they thought about their breakup. Each participant completed two tasks in the study - one related to their feelings of rejection and the other to sensations of physical pain. During the rejection task, participants viewed either a photo of their ex-partner and thought about how they felt during their break-up experience or they viewed a photo of a friend and thought about a recent positive experience they had with that person. During the physical pain task, a thermal stimulation device was attached to participants left forearm. On some trials the probe delivered a painful but tolerable stimulation akin to holding a very hot cup of coffee. On other trials it delivered non-painful, warm stimulation.

Participants performed all tasks while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. The researchers conducted a series of analyses of the fMRI scans, focusing on the whole brain and on various regions of interest identified in earlier studies of physical pain.  It was found that powerfully inducing feelings of social rejection activate regions of the brain that are involved in physical pain sensation, which are rarely activated in neuroimaging studies of emotion. The scans showed that in both the situations the secondary somato sensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula regions of the brain were activated, regions of the brain known to be activated during physical pain. These findings are consistent with the idea that the experience of social rejection or social loss more generally, may represent a distinct emotional experience that is uniquely associated with physical pain.

While earlier research has shown that the same brain regions support the emotionally distressing feelings that accompany the experience of both physical pain and social rejection, the current study is the first known to establish that there is neural overlap between both of these experiences in brain regions that become active when people experience painful sensations in their body. The findings might offer a new insight into how the experience of intense social loss may lead to various physical pain symptoms and disorders.