Social Pain and the Brain: How Insights from Neuroimaging Advance the Study of Social Rejection

Abstract

Imagine a time when a close loved one has given you the “silent treatment”. When describing how this experience made you feel, terms such as “hurt”, “pained”, and “broken-hearted” may have come to mind. Most everyone at one time or another has experienced the pain of social rejection, whether it was in the form of unrequited love or in the form of punishment, such as when a social click ostracizes an outcast. Over the past decade, social psychologists have conducted a great deal of experimental research to uncover the detrimental effects of social rejection. However, social psychologists are just beginning to understand the neural basis of rejection. In the current chapter, we will review the neuroscientific research on social rejection, and we will discuss the implications from neuroimaging studies that advance theory and research in the area. Specifically, we will highlight how neuroimaging has been used to uncover the neural similarities between physical and social pain. We will begin this chapter with a brief introduction to social rejection research. Specifically, we will review research that explores the cognitive, emotional, and behavioral consequences of rejection. We will illustrate the effects of rejection within the domains of: antisocial and prosocial behavior, self-regulation, self-defeating behaviors, and intelligent thought. We will end this section with a discussion of the research that suggests an overlap between physical and social pain. Next we will introduce the neuroscientific approach to the study of social rejection. Specifically, we will review research that has used functional magnetic resonance imaging to help uncover the similarities between social and physical pain. In this section we will focus on activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, as they are associated with the affective component of physical and social pain. We will then discuss how acetaminophen, an over-the-counter medication for treating physical pain, reduces activity in these neural regions among rejected people. Last, we will discuss how neuroimaging has helped social psychologists identify those individuals who are most vulnerable to social rejection. We will review research on the personality characteristics that modulate the neural responses of rejection. Specifically, we will discuss how one’s level of attachment anxiety, self-esteem, and emotion differentiation (i.e., aptitude for using discrete emotion categories to capture one’s felt experience) either heighten or reduce activity in the neural regions associated with the distress of social rejection .