Thursday, 4 September 2008

New Study On Social And Physical Pain

�We all know the famous saying: "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words volition never ache me," but is this proverb actually true?



According to some researchers, dustup may pack a harder punch that we realise. Psychologists Zhansheng Chen and Kipling D. Williams of Purdue University, Julie Fitness of Macquarie University, and Nicola C. Newton of the University of New South Wales found that the pain of strong-arm events may fade with time, patch the painful sensation of social occurrences canful be re-instantiated through memory retrievals.



The researchers put up four-spot experiments to demonstrate this finding. In the number one two experiments, participants reported the amount of nuisance they felt while nerve-wracking to live over a physically or a socially irritating experience. After writing elaborate accounts of each experience, the participants reported how they felt.



The utmost two experiments were similar to the first two, except participants were asked to work on some cognitive tasks with different levels of difficulty subsequently reliving a socially or physically painful event.



The results, published in the August government issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, ar clear. Participants who had to recall a socially painful feel reported stronger feelings of pain and relived the experience more intensely than those wHO had to recall a physically painful event. Furthermore, participants wHO only had to recall a physically painful event performed better on the difficult genial tasks in comparison to those world Health Organization had to relive a socially sore event.



A possible explanation for these results could be the evolution of the human brain, specifically in an area called the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for for complex thinking, perception and language processing.



"The evolution of the cerebral cortex surely improved the ability of human beings to create and adapt; to subroutine in and with groups, communities, and culture; and to respond to pain in the neck associated with social interactions," the authors wrote. "However, the cerebral cortex english hawthorn also have had an unintended effect of allowing humans to relive, re-experience, and tolerate from social pain."




Article: "When Hurt Will Not Heal: Exploring the Capacity to Relive Social and Physical Pain"

Author: Zhansheng Chen


Psychological Science is ranked among the teetotum 10 general psychology journals for encroachment by the Institute for Scientific Information.



Source: Catherine West

Association for Psychological Science



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