Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Why rejection hurts: a common neural alarm system for physical and social pain
Section snippets
An overlap between physical and social pain
We have recently proposed that physical pain – the pain experienced upon bodily injury – and social pain – the pain experienced upon social injury when social relationships are threatened, damaged or lost – share neural and computational mechanisms [1]. This shared system is responsible for detecting cues that might be harmful to survival, such as physical danger or social separation, and then for recruiting attention and coping resources to minimize threat.
Such an overlap would be
A common neural basis
Several lines of evidence suggest that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), specifically the dorsal subdivision (dACC; areas 24′ and 32′), is involved in the affectively distressing components of both physical and social pain. For decades, neurosurgeons have performed cingulotomies, a circumscribed lesioning of the ACC, to treat intractable chronic pain [6]. Patients who have undergone cingulotomies for chronic pain report that they are still able to feel the pain but that it no longer bothers
A common computational basis
Processes that share the same neural circuitry often share some of the same computational mechanisms [25]. Across several neuroimaging and computational modeling studies, it has been shown that the dACC acts as a conflict or discrepancy detector, activated by behavioral response conflicts, such as those produced in the Stroop task [26]. In addition, the dACC might be sensitive to goal conflicts, expectation violations, and errors more generally 27, 28 (see Box 3). Discrepancy detection in dACC
Consequences of the overlap
One of the hypotheses derived from the physical–social pain overlap is that endogenous and exogenous factors that enhance sensitivity to one type of pain should enhance the sensitivity of this alarm system and thus potentiate sensitivity to the other type of pain as well. Alternatively, factors that downregulate the sensitivity to one type of pain should downregulate the sensitivity of the alarm and thus diminish sensitivity to the other type of pain. Existing evidence supports both of these
Conclusion
The findings reviewed here suggest that social and physical pain might rely on overlapping neural processes in the form of a common neural alarm system. Such an overlap is adaptive for mammalian survival given the extended period of immaturity in mammalian young. Nevertheless, evolution's solution to ensured nurturance might have unintentionally produced a lifelong need for social connection and a corresponding sense of distress when social connections are broken. A more complete understanding
Acknowledgements
The preparation of this article was supported by an NSF predoctoral fellowship to N. Eisenberger and by a grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (R21MH66709–01) to M. Lieberman. The authors wish to thank the UCLA Brain Mapping Center and the UCLA Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory for their support in conducting several of the studies that were reviewed here.
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