2024-01-25 17:15:00
A team from the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences combined physical and social pain to understand its effects.
For the study, they recruited college students who recently experienced a romantic breakup, where they were exposed to images of their ex-partners to induce social pain and heat pulses to induce physical pain.
The study observed that social rejection facilitated the perception of physical pain when individuals focusing on their social pain inhibited the perception of physical pain.
The research identified a paradoxical effect of social pain on physical pain, with the brain’s posterior insula encoding the facilitatory effect and the frontal pole participating in the inhibitory effect. Furthermore, the thalamus played a role in moderating both processes, acting as a switch in different states of social pain concern.
The study findings suggest the possibility that psychological regulation modulates perceptual processing of harmful stimuli, which could benefit mental health and human well-being, especially for patients suffering from social pain due to illness or disability.
This study, called “The dual facilitatory and inhibitory effects of social pain on physical pain perception,” was published in the journal iScience.
#social #pain #facilitate #inhibit #physical #pain