LOS ANGELES - Across cultures and language divides, people talk about the sting of social rejection as if it were a physical pain.
We feel "burned" by a partner's infidelity, "wounded" by a friend's harsh words, "crushed" when a loved one fails us, "heartache" when spurned by a lover.
There's a reason for that linguistic conflation, says a growing community of pain researchers: In our brains, too, physical and social pain share much the same neural circuitry. In many ways, in fact, your brain may scarcely make a distinction between a verbal and physical insult.
So the well-worn parental reassurance that "sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never hurt you" is false, these scientists say. And they have the pictures to prove it.
University of Kentucky psychologist Nathan DeWall, a researcher in this young field, says the pain of social exclusion assaults each of us on average about once a day. "It's a big deal," he adds, one that's often unrecognized by friends and colleagues and is downplayed by the emotionally wounded themselves.
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But when it comes to the human brain, evolution has been economical in allocating resources to the problem, DeWall adds. "Instead of creating an entirely new system to respond to social hurt, evolution piggybacked the system for emotional pain onto that for physical pain," he says.
Recently, new research offered further evidence of pain's shared circuitry in the brain. The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, established that two regions of the brain previously known to process only the sensation of physical pain come alive when a person gazes upon a photograph of a former lover and ponders the feelings of rejection that came with being jilted by that person.
"These results give new meaning to the idea that social rejection 'hurts,' " wrote the authors.
The dual role of the brain's pain network offers a powerful example of the connection between body and mind, and may help explain how emotional distress can make us sick and human kindness sustains us in health. And it may yet shed light on an enduring medical mystery: why depression, a sort of emotional pain disorder, coexists so often in patients who also have chronic or neuropathic pain disorders.
At the same time, the overlap underscores the profound importance of social connection as an evolutionary imperative, key to our survival as individuals and a society.
"Physical pain obviously serves a purpose: It's uncomfortable and distressing, but it's a signal that something's wrong, that we need to take action to fix it," says UCLA psychologist Naomi Eisenberger. "I think we can say the same about social pain: It motivates us to reconnect socially and avoid social rejection in the future."
