• DOI:10.3109/01612840.2011.583714
• Corpus ID: 12451262

Heartbreak and Physical Pain Linked in Brain

@article{Flaskerud2011HeartbreakAP,
  title={Heartbreak and Physical Pain Linked in Brain},
  author={Jacquelyn H. Flaskerud},
  journal={Issues in Mental Health Nursing},
  year={2011},
  volume={32},
  pages={789 - 791}
}

• J. Flaskerud
• Published 11 November 2011
• Psychology
• Issues in Mental Health Nursing

How similar are emotional and physical pain? In the US and in cultures around the world, we use the same words—hurt and pain—to describe both emotional and physical experiences. In a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the investigators (Kross et al., 2011) demonstrated that emotional pain and physical pain both light up the same region of the brain under neuroimaging. Their findings revealed that emotional pain (in this case, social rejection) and physical pain (noxious thermal stimulation) are similar, not only in that they are both distressing, but also in that they share a common representation in somatosensory brain systems. They tested 40 participants who felt intensely rejected as a result of recently experiencing an unwanted break-up of a romantic relationship. These individuals performed two counterbalanced tasks for emotional pain and two for physical pain during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The social rejection task compared the fMRIs of participants while they viewed a headshot of their ex-partner and thought about their specific rejection experience with their fMRIs while viewing a headshot of a friend of the same sex as their ex-partner. The physical pain task also compared two components. A “hot trial,” in which participants experienced noxious thermal stimulation on their left forearm with a “warm trial,” in which they received non-noxious thermal stimulation in the same area. The investigators found, using fMRI, that the experience of social rejection recruited brain areas involved with the sensory components of physical pain (secondary somatosensory cortex; dorsal posterior insula), demonstrating the overlap of emotional and physical pain in the brain. In addition to the fMRI, participants were asked to rate how they felt after each task on a 5-point scale. Participants reported