Is emotional pain a physical response?
Feelings and emotions are funny things. Emotional pain doesn’t involve any physical damage to the body, but it hurts just as much as a physical pain does. And it seems that some of the mechanisms of emotional pain may be similar to physical pain, given that recent research demonstrates that analgesics (painkillers) actually blunt feelings of being emotionally hurt.
Everyone has experienced pain and sickness at some point in their lives. For such physical ailments, one of the first things we do–or are instructed to do by medical providers–is take a pain reliever, like acetaminophen (a.k.a., Tylenol). But physical pain isn’t the only kind of pain. Our feelings can also be hurt. So researchers wondered whether acetaminophen, which acts on the central nervous system, could blunt social pain, too. In one experiment, healthy college students were randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. Those who took acetaminophen reported experiencing significantly fewer hurt feelings. In a second experiment, another set of healthy college students was randomly assigned to take acetaminophen or a placebo twice a day for three weeks. At the end of the three weeks, the students were scanned in an MRI machine while playing a virtual ball-tossing game with two other players. After a while, the other players stopped tossing the ball to the subject. Those who had taken the acetaminophen exhibited significantly less neural activity in areas of the brain previously associated with experiencing social and physical pain.
DeWall, N. et al., ”Acetaminophen Reduces Social Pain: Behavioral and Neural Evidence,” Psychological Science (forthcoming).
This is from the Boston Globe
2 Responses to “Is emotional pain a physical response?”
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Published: Jul 11 2010
Interesting topic – there is a great deal of confusion around this topic because emotions and feelings are generally used interchangeably, which is an error from the neuroscience perspective.
According to Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens), perhaps the leading neuroscientist in this realm, a feeling is something that happens in the body, but an emotion is how the brain interprets that feeling based on memory, associations with previous feelings, cognitive interpretations, and the environmental context.
In the context of the article above, this approach helps us make sense of the findings. Emotional pain, say from a broken relationship, is more than likely connected to feelings in the body (stomach upset, muscle pain, lethargy – all of which are similar to withdrawal symptoms from drug use, which is actually a useful comparison since “love” generates changes in brain chemistry not unlike drug use). If the pain killer can resolve some of the physical complaints (which he seldom identify with the emotions we experience), them it makes sense that the emotional pain would also subside a bit.
The bottom-line issue here (and the foundation of body-based therapies) is that most people are totally divorced from their bodies.
Damasio’s distinction is really interesting, and is close to Buddhist teachings. I’ve always understood feelings and emotions to be different things in exactly the same way you point out: vedanas are automatic “secondary sensations” that arise in the body in response to sense contacts. They’re of three types: pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral. I think a lot of things like disappointment, hurt, and perhaps even fear are vedanas. The Buddhist tradition (or at least the Abidhamma tradition) does hold that some vedenas are mental and some are physical, but I take this to mean that some arise through physical sensations (touching, seeing, etc) while others arise from mental sensations (memory, imagination, etc).
Buddhism doesn’t seem to have a clear-cut term that corresponds exactly with what we call “emotions.” There are a number of terms like cetasikas or sankharas that include emotions, but they tend to include “thinking” processes too — as if thinking/emoting are seen as inseparable.
The 12 nidanas include four steps that are very relevant, though: (sensory) contact leads to feeling (vedana), which leads to craving (just one example of emotion), which leads to grasping (the action that typically follows from craving). Even if Buddhism and Western psychology have different ways of slicing up our experience, I think they’re increasingly looking at the dynamic of that experience in similar ways.