Broken Heart and Physical Pain

People have experienced broken hearts for centuries.  Today psychologists in a quest for grant money, I suppose, have decided to study this aspect of the human experience.  It's the type of research that falls under the category of “Now that I know this what do I do?”  My comments are in italics.

The Very Real Pain Of A Broken Heart

"Broken-hearted" isn't just a metaphor - social pain and physical pain have a lot in common, according to Naomi Eisenberger of the University of California-Los Angeles, the author of a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. In the paper, she surveys recent research on the overlap between physical and social pain.

I imagine this is like when your girlfriend dumps you because you damaged her car when she ran you over with it.

"Rejection is such a powerful experience for people," Eisenberger says. "If you ask people to think back about some of their earliest negative experiences, they will often be about rejection, about being picked last for a team or left out of some social group."

I can imagine they will label this as the Charlie Brown syndrome and convince health insurance companies to cover their services in the treatment of such a syndrome.  Maybe a lawyer can get involved and start some lawsuits against kids who are adults now but traumatized someone else by not picking them for a team when they were younger.  I can almost see attorneys smiling and rubbing their hands after this suggestion.

People talk about hurt feelings and broken hearts, but Eisenberger realized they might be onto something when she and a colleague noticed how similar their images of brain activity looked in people who had experienced social rejection and others who had experienced physical pain. "We were sitting next to each other and noticed how similar the two brain images looked," she says.

Just what were they doing while they were sitting next to each other?  Hurling insults as they slapped one another around?  I bet there’s a syndrome for that behavior if only someone would fund a study of it.

That similarity has held up in later research. Physical pain and social pain are processed in some of the same regions of the brain. Physical pain has two aspects: the sensory experience of pain and the emotional component. It is the latter that is shared with social pain.  Some research has suggested that severe social rejection, like being dumped, can also be processed in the part of your brain that handles the sensory component of pain.

I disagree with this finding.  When I’ve been dumped it was processed by the part of my brain that caused me to a lot of drink beer and go to all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurants.  A lady I know said being dumped caused her to eat massive amounts of chocolate and watch sappy movies. 

People who are more sensitive to physical pain are also more sensitive to social pain.  "It follows in a logical way that the physical and social pain systems overlap.  "We take Tylenol for physical pain; it's not supposed to work on social pain."

Huh?  Are you telling me there are sober people who are not sensitive to physical pain?  Are these the kind of people who easily take rejection and you can beat the hell out of for fun and it won’t bother them?  Sounds like someone I want to hang out with.

Eisenberger does not recommend taking painkillers so you don't feel social pain.

I think she should recommend taking chocolate and beer.

"If we're constantly numbing the feeling of social rejection, are we going to be more likely do things that get us rejected, that alienate us?" There may be some cases where the social pain is too much, though; future research may look at whether it should sometimes be treated.

Of course, there must be future research.  How about they study the effects of people avoiding psychologists wanting them to participate in studies and beat up the psychologists just to make a point?  Now that type of study would give them first-hand experience in both the world of social and physical pain. I might even kick in some cash for that one.

"We seem to hold physical pain in higher regard than social pain," she says.

I agree.  I’d pay more attention to someone screaming in gut-wrenching agony than someone who gorging on cookies because they’re depressed.

While bystanders understand that physical pain hurts and can be debilitating, the same empathy doesn't always extend to people feeling social pain."

I wonder if this psychologist knows anyone who is as whiney as some people I know.  After a while of listening to their constant complaining, you really want to hit them.

Here is a link to the article.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/broken-hearts-really-hurt.html  

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