Research Article
When Hurt Will Not Heal
Exploring the Capacity to Relive Social and Physical Pain
Zhansheng Chen,1 Kipling D. Williams,1 Julie Fitness,2 and Nicola C. Newton3
1Purdue University, 2Macquarie University, and 3University of New South Wales
ABSTRACT—Recent discoveries suggest that social pain is as
real and intense as physical pain, and that the social-pain
system may have piggybacked on the brain structure that
had evolved earlier for physical pain. The present study
examined an important distinction between social and
physical pain: Individuals can relive and reexperience
social pain more easily and more intensely than physical
pain. Studies 1 and 2 showed that people reported higher
levels of pain after reliving a past socially painful event
than after reliving a past physically painful event. Studies
3 and 4 found, in addition, that people performed worse
on cognitively demanding tasks after they relived social
rather than physical pain. Implications for research on
social pain and theories about social pain are discussed.
If no one turned round when we entered, answered when we spoke,
or minded what we did, but if every person we met ‘cut us dead,’
and acted as if we were non-existing things, a kind of rage and
impotent despair would ere long well up in us, from which the
cruelest bodily tortures would be a relief [italics added] . . . . (James,
1890/1950, pp. 293–294)
James (1890/1950) suggested a distinction between physical
pain and social pain: that when push comes to shove, people
would prefer physical over social pain. Why? As James sug-
gested, one reason is that victims of one form of social pain—
social ostracism—want some sort of attention, even if it is
negative. In fact, long-term sufferers of the ‘‘silent treatment’’
have often commented that they would actually prefer physical
abuse for two reasons: to obtain some form of recognition and to
be able to show other people some physical evidence of their
suffering (Williams & Zadro, 2001). In this article, we suggest
another reason. Specifically, whereas both types of pain are
agonizingly intense, physical pain is typically short-lived, where-
as social pain may last forever. The importance of this distinc-
tion is twofold: First, we propose that the groundswell of support
for the notion that social pain is inherently similar to, or even
derived from, physical pain needs to be reined in, to acknowl-
edge that there are important distinctions between the two types
of pain. Second, we argue that theorists who test their proposi-
tions regarding the distinctive impact of social exclusion or
mortality salience by employing control conditions of physical
pain (e.g., broken bones, dental pain) are insufficiently control-
ling for current pain levels.
Pain is, by definition, unpleasant, but it serves an evolution-
arily crucial function. Pain gets people’s attention, alerts them
to a threat to their well-being, and motivates them to take re-
medial action (e.g., escape; see Eccleston & Crombez, 1999).
When pain arises from tissue injury, the crucial attention-getting
function of pain is clear. If organisms did not notice physical
injury, they would not be motivated to avoid potential sources
of life-threatening danger. However, humans, along with other
mammals, have another source of potential protection from life’s
dangers: each other. As Panksepp (1998) has argued, from birth
all mammals are ‘‘utterly dependent creatures whose survival is
founded on the quality of our social bonds’’ (p. 262).
Some researchers argue that the neuroarchitecture for the
experience of social pain has, in effect, piggybacked on the
already-established neuroarchitecture that evolved for the ex-
perience of physical pain (Eisenberger & Lieberman, 2004,
2005; MacDonald & Leary, 2005; Panksepp, 2003). Further,
they suggest that over the course of mammalian evolution, social
pain triggered threat-defense responses (e.g., distress calls) by
stimulating an evolutionarily more primitive system for dealing
with physical injury—the pain system.
The overlap between these two systems is supported by physi-
ological and psychological evidence (see MacDonald & Leary,
2005, for a review). Similar terms are used to describe social
and physical pain in a wide variety of languages and cultures,
and threats to social inclusion lead to physiological changes
consistent with preparation for a physical threat (MacDonald,
Kingsbury, & Shaw, 2005). Recently, Eisenberger, Lieberman,
Address correspondence to Zhansheng Chen or Kipling Williams,
Purdue University, Department of Psychological Sciences, 703 Third
St., West Lafayette, IN 47907, e-mail: chen@psych.purdue.edu or
kip@psych.purdue.edu.
PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE
Volume 19—Number 8 789Copyrightr 2008 Association for Psychological Science

and Williams (2003) found that social pain (from ostracism)
activated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. These results
suggest that social exclusion is detected regardless of an im-
puted intention—as is physical pain—and that it is experienced
as pain in the same brain region that detects and experiences
physical pain. But does this necessarily mean that the experi-
ence of social pain and the experience of physical pain are best
understood as identical phenomena?
Research on memory for pain suggests differences between
social and physical pain. Pain memory includes memory for the
pain event and for the pain experience (Morley, 1993). Pain-
event memory refers to the remembrance of the circumstances in
which the pain was experienced, and pain-experience memory
involves remembering the sensory, intensity, and affective quali-
ties of a pain without reexperiencing it. Researchers have found
that people can accurately recall both their physical-pain ex-
periences (Erskine, Morley, & Pearce, 1990; Morley, 1993) and
their social-pain experiences. Safer, Bonanno, and Field (2001)
had participants report their grief-related symptoms and thoughts
6 months following the death of their spouses. More than 4 years
later, participants accurately recalled how they felt at the time of
the 6-month report. Recently, Porter and Peace (2007) found that
people’s memory of traumatic experiences (social or physical),
including their vividness, quality, and sensory components,
remained unchanged several years after these experiences.
Although people have some capacity to remember their ex-
periences of physical and social pain, research suggests that
they find it difficult to reexperience physical pain. None of
Morley’s (1993) 136 participants reexperienced the pain after
writing about a past accident, although most of them were able to
provide detailed information about the pain event and could
remember characteristics of the pain experience, including its
intensity, sensation, and affective properties. Thus, people can
remember they have experienced physical pain and remember it
was unpleasant; however, they do not appear to be able to relive,
or reexperience, the pain once the stimulus has been removed.
Social pain, however, may be different. For example, in a study
of memories of interpersonal betrayal, Hansson, Jones, and
Fletcher (1990) found that people 60 years and older still had
strong feelings of pain from experiences that had happened
many years previously.
The evidence suggests that social pain, but not physical pain,
can be relived. As yet, there have been no direct comparisons of
social and physical pain. Our aim in the study reported here was
to examine the extent to which individuals can relive and re-
experience physical and social pain. For social pain, we focused
on betrayal, a profoundly painful experience (Fitness, 2001;
Leary, Springer, Negel, Ansell, & Evans, 1998). We asked par-
ticipants to relive their past painful experiences by writing in
detail what had happened and how they had felt. In Studies 1
(within-subjects design) and 2 (between-subjects design), par-
ticipants were asked to report the amount of pain they were
experiencing in the lab while attempting to relive physical- or
social-pain experiences. In Studies 3 and 4, participants’ per-
formance on various cognitive tasks was used as a measure of on-
line interference from actual, relived physical or social pain.
Our hypothesis was that social pain can be relived more in-
tensely than physical pain.
STUDIES 1 AND 2
Method
Participants
In Study 1, 61 introductory psychology students from Macquarie
University (14 men, 47 women; mean age 5 21.6 years, SD 5
6.2, range5 18–50 years) were asked to relive both social pain
and physical pain; the order of the two reliving tasks was coun-
terbalanced. In Study 2, 66 introductory psychology students
from Purdue University (30 men, 36 women; mean age 5 19.21
years, SD 5 1.16, range 5 17–23) were randomly assigned to
relive either social pain or physical pain. In both studies, partic-
ipants received course credit for participation.
Materials
We measured participants’ experience of pain with the McGill
Pain Questionnaire (MPQ; Melzack, 1975, 1983) and the Pain
Slide.
The MPQ is a self-report questionnaire for the psychometric
assessment of pain syndromes. It is composed of 78 pain de-
scriptors (e.g., ‘‘dull,’’ ‘‘sore’’), which are clustered into 20 sub-
categories. For each subcategory, participants were asked to
choose 1 item that best described their feelings. We used the
major index from the MPQ, the Pain Rating Index (PRI), to as-
sess participants’ current feelings of pain.
The Pain Slide, a visual analog scale typically used by doc-
tors, consists of a ruler marked with a 10-point scale (1 5 no
pain, 10 5 intense pain) and with drawings of corresponding
facial expressions denoting pain. Participants move a tab up and
down the scale to indicate the intensity of pain they are expe-
riencing.
Procedure
In Study 1, participants relived both physical- and social-pain
experiences (in counterbalanced order); in Study 2, participants
recalled and relived either a physical- or a social-pain experi-
ence. Otherwise, the procedure was the same in the two studies.
Participants were tested individually via a computer program
(MediaLab; Jarvis, 2005). Participants were asked to answer a
series of demographic questions and then recalled in detail an
experience of physical injury, an experience of betrayal by a
person who was close to them, or both; each experience was to
have occurred within the previous 5 years. To help participants
recall their pain, we allowed them unlimited time to write open-
ended accounts in which they described what had happened to
them and how they had felt.
790 Volume 19—Number 8
Social and Physical Pain