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Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain

  1. Tor D. Wagerd
  1. aDepartment of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109;
  2. bDepartment of Psychology, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027;
  3. cNew York State Psychiatric Institute, New York, NY 10032; and
  4. dDepartment of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0345

  1. Contributed by Edward E. Smith, February 22, 2011 (sent for review October 05, 2010)

Abstract

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—by having people who recently experienced an unwanted break-up view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected—areas that support 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 specificity of the 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 “hurts.” They demonstrate that rejection and physical pain are similar not only in that they are both distressing—they share a common somatosensory representation as well.

Footnotes

  • ↵1To whom correspondence may be addressed. E-mail: eesmith{at}psych.columbia.edu or ekross{at}umich.edu.

  • Author contributions: E.K., W.M., E.E.S., and T.D.W. designed research; E.K. performed research; E.K., M.G.B., and T.D.W. analyzed data; and E.K., M.G.B., W.M., E.E.S., and T.D.W. wrote the paper.

  • The authors declare no conflict of interest.

  • This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1102693108/-/DCSupplemental.

Freely available online through the PNAS open access option.

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