Social Pain: Characteristics, Causes And Associated Psychological Factors
Pain is an unpleasant experience that living beings suffer in a part of their body, caused by various reasons and two types of pain worth highlighting: physical pain and social pain.
There is quite a consensus that social pain could be defined as an emotional experience that is unpleasant and is triggered when a person feels rejected by other people with whom they wish to integrate socially, so that this rejection can produce the same feelings of suffering that if they experience physical pain.
This article will try to explain the differences and common characteristics between physical pain and social pain.
When we talk about the concept of pain we are referring to a universal experience in all beings; However, the different ways of suffering pain and The different ways of feeling it present many nuances.
For example, when we accidentally cut our finger while we were slicing a lemon, we will most likely feel pain in that finger; while we also tend to feel pain when we feel rejection from a loved one or a person we admire.
The word to refer to that sensation that we experience in both cases is pain; However, the origin that caused it is totally different. So It is worth asking whether the physiological mechanisms underlying both types of pain are similar.
What is social pain?
Social pain is defined as an emotional experience that is annoying and unpleasant, being triggered when a person feels rejected by another person or by a group of people with whom they would like to relate, so that this rejection suffered can cause that person suffering very similar to what they would experience due to physical pain. Furthermore, social pain also includes experiences of loneliness, ostracism, stacking, grief, loss, rejection, interpersonal conflicts, and negative social feedback.
Currently, there is research that has allowed us to know the role of the social factor in people to adapt to pain and above all. how fluctuations in mood or behavior can trigger supportive responses in other people and also changes in their social relationships. Likewise, research in the field of neuroscience has identified an underlying neural pathway shared in the emergencies of social pain and physical pain.
A person’s social rejection is experienced by themselves with feelings of pain because their reaction to that rejection is measured by the same neurological processing systems as if they were experiencing physical pain.
This is why social rejection, bullying, and other ways that make a person feel socially excluded, have been shown to cause social pain in the person who suffers it, being a deep and devastating pain at various levels. The person’s brain experiences that social pain as if it had just suffered a physical blow.
It is essential to give the importance it deserves to bullying or any form of social rejection that many people suffer daily. highlighting children, which is why both psychology and neuroscience have carried out numerous studies in this regard.
Furthermore, it is common that people and society in general do not give the same importance to social violence, the result of rejection that triggers the isolation of the person who has been rejected, as to physical violence, despite the fact that the pain experienced In both cases it is quite similar, and social pain can leave worse psychological consequences.
Relationship between social pain and physical pain
Social pain and physical pain, when suffered, they activate similar brain regions as a way of responding to the emotional experience suffered due to the two types of discomfort. And both are capable of activating dysphoric emotional states, causing patterns of cognitive evaluation and also motivating behavioral changes.
In turn, research that has analyzed both types of pain has been able to discover that People who are more sensitive to physical pain are, in most cases, also sensitive to social pain. Sensitivity towards the experience of physical pain has also been linked to experiences of rejection or social support and social pain.
Experiments on social pain
Research studied the neurophysiology of social pain with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques, discovering that the brain areas involved in the distress caused by physical pain also play a role. a relevant role in the anguish caused by a failed social experience that has been painful for the person.
On the other hand, people who had greater social support or a busier social life showed less activity in those brain areas involved in both physical pain and social pain. This research was able to demonstrate that suffering a negative evaluation at a social level, accompanied by negative comments that denote rejection of oneself by others, activates regions of the brain that are related to the affective dimension of pain.
Scientific hypotheses and theories have been developed about the biological utility that this overlap between social pain and physical pain could have as evolutionary mechanisms to serve as a tool for social animals to respond to different threats to social inclusion.
There is other research that suggests that In animals and humans there is a convergence between the two types of pain at various levels since due to the long process of development and path towards maturity that human beings experience, the social attachment system they have could have been superimposed on the pain system, also taking as its own that signal of perceiving pain in the face of rejection. social to avoid the very harmful consequences that social separation and isolation entail for human beings.
When a person suffers social pain occasionally, his or her way of responding to that negative event could be socially appropriate; On the other hand, if this social pain were to become a chronic condition, their self-esteem could be affected, at the same time that they could develop feelings of rejection towards others and behave in a way against them, so that they would use strategies of ineffective, as well as harmful, coping, reducing their intentions to engage in prosocial behavior.
There are also studies on social pain that have found that this pain has a tendency to reappear years after the negative social situation experienced in the past has ended so that real cases have been found of adults who continue to experience unpleasant feelings related to social pain that could be closely related to the bullying suffered during childhood.
Likewise, it was discovered that if people who had suffered negative social experiences in the past, up to 5 years ago, were asked to experience intense pain when mentally reliving them.
A meta-analysis in which a sample of 308,849 people was exhaustively studied, during a follow-up period (7 and a half years), reflected among its results that people who maintained healthy social relationships and strong ties with other people tended to enjoy a better health and were also estimated to have up to 50% greater chances of survival; being comparable to the action of quitting smoking in the long term. In addition, social isolation outweighed other health risk factors such as a sedentary lifestyle and obesity.
