By Lori Lowe
We’ve all heard of people dying of a broken heart. We’ve all felt physically hurt by something a friend or loved one said or did. It turns out our brains also view physical and emotional pain in a similar manner. Both physical and social pain share some of the same neural circuitry in our brains. The words we say to our loved ones have even more power than we may have realized, especially the power to cause real pain.
Rather than being a rare occurrence, University of Kentucky psychologist Nathan DeWall says we may each feel the emotional wounding of social exclusion an average of once per day. Because of the frequency of occurrence, scientists think our brains have evolved to use the same circuit that had been used for only physical pain to also handle emotional pain.
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