STICKS and stones can break your bones, but words can also hurt you. Scientists have shown that the pain of feeling personally insulted can seem as real to the mind as that of a physical injury.

The hurt a person feels when snubbed is much more than a literary metaphor. It is produced by the same patterns of brain activity that follow a physical injury, US research shows.

Social distress and physical pain activate the same region of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, indicating that they are processed and experienced in similar fashion.

The findings from the University of California, Los Angeles, explain the way in which people can feel physically shaken by emotional distress. Science is starting to unlock the secrets of “why it ‘hurts’ to lose someone we love,” said Naomi Eisenberger, who led the research.

Dr Eisenberger’s team used functional magentic resonance imaging to scan the brains of volunteers playing a computer game of catch. The player controlled a hand at the bottom of the screen, and could see two other figures with whom they would throw a virtual ball. The volunteers were told the other figures were controlled by other participants, although they were actually pre-set by computer.

In the first part of the experiment, the volunteers were told that they could not take part in the game because of technical problems, but watched as the other figures threw the virtual ball to one another. This was set up to mimic “implicit social exclusion” in which one person is left out for reasons beyond his or her control.

In the second part, the player initially joined in but after a few rounds, the two computer characters began to ignore the human player. To the volunteer, it looked like “explicit social exclusion”.

The brain scans, details of which are published today in the journal Science, showed that both events triggered characteristic patterns of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. This part is known to be involved in sensing physical pain and acts as an alarm system that something is wrong.

When people felt they were being deliberately slighted, another part of the brain involved in pain, the right ventral prefrontal cortex, was also activated. This region regulates and inhibits pain.

Dr Eisenberger said the results suggest that emotional pain may have evolved by “piggybacking” on the body’s physical pain response to alert people to potentially damaging social problems. A person who is being shut out of a social group or family is likely to be more vulnerable.

“Because of the adaptive value of mammalian social bonds, the social attachment system, which keeps young near caregivers, may have piggybacked onto the physical pain system to promote survival,” Dr Eisenberger said. Metaphors that speak of the pain and hurt of the human condition may thus have a basis in neurology.

“It is a basic feature of human experience to feel soothed in the presence of close others and to feel distressed when left behind,” she said. “Many languages reflect this experience in the assignment of physical pain words — ‘hurt feelings’ — to describe social separation.

“However the notion that the pain associated with losing someone is similar to the pain experienced upon physical injury seems more metaphorical than real. Nonetheless, evidence suggests that some of the same neural machinery may also be involved in the experience of pain associated with social separation or rejection. This study suggests that social pain is analagous in its neurocognitive function to physical pain.”

Jaak Panksepp, a psychologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, said the findings suggest that positive social interaction could have a benefit on feelings of physical pain. “Poets have written about the pain of a broken heart,” he said. “It seems that such insights into the human condition are now supported by neurophysiological findings. Will the opposite also be the case — that socially supportive and loving feelings reduce the sting of pain?”

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