Feeling the Pain of Social Loss

摘要

The Greek philosopher Zeno of Citium (356 to 264 B.C.), the founder of Stoicism, considered pain to be one of nine forms of grief. We often speak about the loss of a loved one in terms of painful feelings, but it is still not clear to what extent such metaphors reflect what is actually happening in the human brain? Enter Eisenberger and colleagues on page 290 of this issue with a bold neuroimaging experiment that seeks to discover whether the metaphor for the psychological pain of social loss is reflected in the neural circuitry of the human brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they show that certain human brain areas that "light up" during physical pain are also activated during emotional pain induced by social exclusion.