Psychology Commons^™

Why Social Pain Can Live On: Different Neural Mechanisms Are Associated With Reliving Social And Physical Pain, Meghan L. Meyer, Kipling D. Williams, Naomi I. Eisenberger

Department of Psychological Sciences Faculty Publications

Although social and physical pain recruit overlapping neural activity in regions associated with the affective component of pain, the two pains can diverge in their phenomenology. Most notably, feelings of social pain can be re-experienced or "relived," even when the painful episode has long passed, whereas feelings of physical pain cannot be easily relived once the painful episode subsides. Here, we observed that reliving social (vs. physical) pain led to greater self-reported re-experienced pain and greater activity in affective pain regions (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula). Moreover, the degree of relived pain correlated positively with affective pain system …