Everyone at one
time or another, experienced negative social events that threaten our sense of
social connection: divorce and breakups, exclusion from attractive groups, the
deaths of loved ones. Interestingly, descriptions of these experiences borrow
heavily from the language of physical pain.
Research
suggests that the reason these metaphors come so easily to us may be that
social pain – the profound distress experienced when social ties are absent,
threatened, damaged, or lost – is elaborated by the same neural and
neurochemical substrates involved in processing physical pain.
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