Recognition of Social Suffering through Brain Circuits

Social exclusion can always be a difficult thing to deal with at any age. What many of us don't realize is that the pain from this problem often signals dangerous stimuli-both internal and external-that guide our behavior, with the ultimate goal to get away from the negative issue and recover. The same is true when we detect this misfortune happening to others. We don't like it. It typically makes us feel uneasy, and we may even feel actual pain via brain circuits.

Based on a study conducted by researchers Giorgia Silani, Giovanni Novembre and Marco Zanon of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste, they set out to determine how social pain actives some brain circuits of physical pain when we feel it personally or when we experience it vicariously as an empathic response to other people's pain.

The researchers note the following, courtesy of a press release: "Classic experiments used a stylized procedure in which social exclusion situations were simulated by cartoons. We suspected that this simplification was excessive and likely to lead to systematic biases in data collection, so we used real people in videos."

For their research, subjects were asked to participate in experimental sessions that contained the simulation of a ball tossing game in which one of the players was deliberately excluded by others-a condition of social pain. In such cases, the player could be the subject herself or her assigned confederate was administered a small dose of painful stimulus-a condition of physical pain. Yet when a player was not personally the target of the stimulus, they were still able to second-handedly experience the other individual's pain. 

"Our data have shown that in conditions of social pain there is activation of an area traditionally associated with the sensory processing of physical pain, the posterior insular cortex", Silani said, via the release. "This occurred both when the pain was experienced in first person and when the subject experienced it vicariously".

She concludes the following, courtesy of the release: "Our findings lend support to the theoretical model of empathy that explains involvement in other people's emotions by the fact that our representation is based on the representation of our own emotional experience in similar conditions."

What do you think?

More information regarding the study can be found via the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.