Trends in Cognitive Sciences
OpinionBeyond metaphor: contrasting mechanisms of social and physical pain
Section snippets
Beyond metaphor: does social exclusion really ‘hurt’?
Poets, novelists, and philosophers have, for centuries, attempted to make seemingly intangible emotional states more tangible by comparing them to sensory states. A common example of this literary device is the comparison of emotional distress to physical pain. Although both states may involve suffering, it is undeniable that physical pain is perceptually distinct from the emotional experiences to which it is commonly compared. Thus, a ‘broken heart’ from a failed relationship does not ‘feel’
The arguments for social ‘pain’: commonalities in neurochemistry and brain activation
Two arguments have been put forth to support the hypothesis that social distress is physically painful: common neurochemistry and common patterns of brain activation. Given that functional neuroimaging studies have propelled this hypothesis into the spotlight, the focus of this review is on common patterns of brain activations.
The myth of the ‘pain matrix’: a construct based on reverse inference
In a seminal study that introduced the use of laser-evoked brain potentials to study nociception in humans, Carmon et al. concluded that ‘it is possible that only the arousing and alerting effect of pain is responsible for the electroencephalographic phenomenon observed’ [16]. A few years later, Chapman et al. stated that these responses ‘cannot be considered neurophysiological representations of pain sensations’ [17]. In the past 20 years, studies conducted with different types of in vivo
Social and physical pain: mechanistic similarities and differences
Despite the reviewed evidence prompting a more cautious interpretation of the apparent similarities between brain responses to social and physical pain, we maintain that examining the neural overlap between these experiences is an important endeavor. First, such overlap provides a critical window into how evolutionary pressure might foster efficiency by developing a common system for detecting and responding to potentially threatening environmental events, regardless of their origin.
Perhaps
Concluding remarks
In sum, the experimental evidence that has been used to support the view that social and physical pain are experientially similar because they share a common neurophysiological substrate is questionable. Indeed, the overlap between the brain regions responding to social pain and those responding to physical pain can be entirely explained by the fact that the two experiences are salient and hence trigger multimodal cognitive processes involved in detecting, orienting attention towards, and/or
Acknowledgments
We wish to thank Dr Jonathan Downar and Dr Meng Liang for their insights. This work was supported by a Wellcome Trust project grant and a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to G.D.I.; a Marie Curie European Reintegration 715 Grant to A.M.; an IASP International Trainee Fellowship to M.M.; and a Canadian Institutes of Health Research grant to K.D.D.
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