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Study: Romantic Rejection Hurts Like Physical Pain
There's a reason they call it a broken heart: Romantic rejection causes physical pain, new research suggests. [color=#005497! important][color=#005497! important]Psychologists studied 40 recently-dumped volunteers who reported intense feelings of rejection when thinking about the breakup. All underwent four MRI brain scans, including one while looking at a photo of their ex and thinking about the split, and one while viewing a friend's photo and thinking good thoughts about that person. Another scan took place as the volunteers wore an arm device that produced a gentle, comforting warmth, and yet another when the device was hot enough to cause pain. During each of the two negative situations—when the volunteers thought about the breakup and when they experienced a burning sensation—the same brain regions associated with physical pain lit up, suggesting physical pain and the pain of rejection hurt in a similar way, according to the study, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Interestingly, when the researchers analyzed 150 past brain-scan experiments on negative emotions, they found that none activated the brain's physical sensory areas like romantic rejection did. "There may be something special about rejection," study author Edward Smith, a psychology professor at Columbia University, told Bloomberg. "No other negative emotion, not anger and not fear, elicits reactions in the pain matrix of the brain."
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