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Here’s an article I found interesting…may haps you will enjoy it as well. The article covers research conducted by Enter Eisenberger et al. which suggests a connection in the brain between physical pain and the emotional pain of social loss. Jaak Panksepp’s article Feeling the Pain of Social Loss from Science (Vol. 302, October 10, 2003) summarizes the findings of Enter Eisenberger and colleagues from an experiment where they measured brain activity during a simulation in which a subject was led to feel excluded. Search Science magazine’s website (sciencemag.org) for the article – I don’t want to post a link since I’m not sure what the policy is for links on this site. Anyway, using fMRI, the research team essentially saw that the same regions of the brain that became active during times of physical pain became active during emotional pain due to social loss. I won’t go into the specifics, but if anyone reads the article, post here and let me know what you think.

In case my synopsis wasn’t enough to make you bite, here’s a tasty quote:

“The correspondence between the brain regions activated during human sadness and those activated during animal separation distress suggests that human feelings may arise from the instinctual emotional action systems of ancient regions of the mammalian brain,” (Panksepp).