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Brain centers light up depending on feelings of love and attachment. New ideas for couples counseling?
Ethan Kross, Marc G. Berman, Walter Mischel, Edward E. Smith, and Tor D. Wager
Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain
PNAS 2011 ; published ahead of print March 28, 2011, doi:10.1073/pnas.1102693108
How similar are the experiences of social rejection and physical pain? Extant research suggests that a network of brain regions that support the affective but not the sensory components of physical pain underlie both experiences. Here we demonstrate that when rejection is powerfully elicited experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected the sensory components of physical pain (secondary somatosensory cortex; dorsal posterior insula) become active. We demonstrate the overlap between social rejection and physical pain in these areas by comparing both conditions in the same individuals using functional MRI. We further demonstrate the specithe secondary somatosensory cortex and dorsal posterior insula activity to physical pain by comparing activated locations in our study with a database of over 500 published studies. Activation in these regions was highly diagnostic of physical pain, with positive predictive values up to 88%. These results give new meaning to the idea that rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are both distressing as well.—by having people who recently—areas that support ficity of“hurts.” They demonstrate that rejection—they share a common somatosensory representation