When we feel isolated or outright rejected by someone, it hurts. But we often deal with it as if it's not something serious or that we will eventually move on from it without having any drastic effects on our psyche or general well-being. However, there may actually be some kind of connection between emotional and physical pain. And rejection might cut deeper than we think.
In a landmark experiment in 2003, Eisenberger and her colleagues had test subjects strapped with virtual-reality headsets. Peering through goggles, the participants could see their own hand and a ball, plus two cartoon characters – the avatars of fellow participants in another room. With the press of a button, each player could toss the ball to another player while the researchers measured their brain activity through fMRI scans.
In the first round of CyberBall – as the game became known – the ball flew back and forth just as you’d expect, but pretty soon the players in the second room started making passes only to each other, completely ignoring the player in the first room. In reality, there were no other players: just a computer programmed to ‘reject’ each participant so that the scientists could see how exclusion – what they called ‘social pain’ – affects the brain.
After analyzing the data, researchers found that the same neural circuits that respond when we experience physical pain such as having a broken bone also lit up when the participants of CyberBall had experienced being rejected or socially excluded.
This leads us to considering whether social exclusion or rejection may need medical help instead of simply being shrugged off as something that we can get by or get used to. Further studies also suggest that the effects of these linked emotional and physical pain might lead to health compromises or even diseases.
According to Eisenberger, the significance of social pain goes back to evolution. Throughout history, we depended on other people for survival: they nurtured us, helped to gather food and provide protection against predators and enemy tribes. Social relationships literally kept us alive. Perhaps, then, just like physical pain, the pain of rejection evolved as a signal of threat to our lives.
And perhaps nature, taking a clever shortcut, simply ‘borrowed’ the existing mechanism for physical pain instead of creating a new one from scratch, which is how broken bones and broken hearts ended up so intimately interconnected in our brains.
-via Kottke
(Image credit: Kelly Sikkema/Unsplash)