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
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