Social pain vs. physical pain

 

The proverb ’sticks and stones may break your bones, but words will never hurt you’ has been a comfort to generations of bullied children.

But now psychologists have found that the reverse may in fact be the case, with the pain of hurt feelings far outlasting memories of physical pain.

They asked volunteers to recall times when they had suffered physical pain in the past five years and also when they had suffered what the study called ’social pain’ - unpleasant emotional interactions such as being betrayed or left out.

The participants wrote accounts of the experiences and then underwent psychological testing to compare how much pain they felt then and now.

The analysis revealed that the pain caused by an unpleasant social event remained consistently more vivid in the mind than that from a physical injury.

(….go on reading: Daily Mail)