Broken heart hurts as much as physical pain

Last Updated on Tuesday, 30 November 1999 00:00 Tuesday, 29 March 2011 10:21

The bitch dumped you and now it feels like she might as well have stabbed you in the back. Two timing, back stabbing piece of filthy whore. But on the bright side, your feelings might be entirely justified. A new study says that a broken heart can hurt as much as physical pain.

Social psychologist Ethan Kross, lead author of the report and hailing from the University of Michigan, said research demonstrated that the same regions of the brain became active in response to sensory experiences activated during intense experiences of social rejection.

"On the surface, spilling a hot cup of coffee on yourself and thinking about how rejected you feel when you look at the picture of a person that you recently experienced an unwanted break-up with may seem to elicit very different types of pain," said Kross.

"But this research shows that they may be even more similar than initially thought."

The study consisted of 40 losers people who had suffered a break-up in the past six months. Critically, thinking about the break-up made them feel intensely rejected. Each person was monitored during their feelings of rejection and during another experiment for physical pain.

To enhance the feelings of rejection, each person had to look at a picture of the bitch/bastard that caused them so much pain and think of how they felt during their break-up. Then they had to look at a friend's picture and think happy thoughts.

For the physical test, a stimulation device was attached to their arm which delivered a painful stimulation and at other times a warm, non-painful stimulation.

All the while the people were monitored by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) scans of the brain. "We found that powerfully inducing feelings of social rejection activate regions of the brain that are involved in physical pain sensation, which are rarely activated in neuroimaging studies of emotion," said Kross.

"These findings are consistent with the idea that the experience of social rejection, or social loss more generally, may represent a distinct emotional experience that is uniquely associated with physical pain," said Kross. "This idea that 'my feelings hurt' may well be more than a metaphor."

So yes, the bitch might as well have stabbed you. And soon you'll be seing your local court packed to the rafters with busy lawyers suing ex's for emotional pain. Because if both emotional and physical pain are the same, and you get compensated for physical pain...you see where I'm going with this, right?