Since the original CyberBall experiment, a number of studies have replicated and extended its results. At one point, Eisenberger and her team posed a seemingly daft question: if physical and emotional pain are related, could a painkiller relieve heartache? In the study that followed, some participants took two daily doses of Tylenol a common painkiller for three weeks while others took a placebo, and each group recorded their day-to-day emotions in a diary.
By the end of the experiment, the Tylenol group reported less distress and showed less brain activity in the pain regions after being rejected than the placebo group. Still, the Tylenol study reveals something remarkable about rejection: that it can spill beyond our emotional lives and into our physical selves.
In fact, in recent years social rejection has emerged as key to a number of discoveries across psychology, neuroscience, economics, evolutionary biology, epidemiology and genetics, forcing scientists to rethink what makes us sick or healthy, why some people live long while others die early, and how social inequalities affect our brains and bodies.
According to Eisenberger, the significance of social pain goes back to evolution. Throughout history, we depended on other people for survival: they nurtured us, helped to gather food and provide protection against predators and enemy tribes. Social relationships literally kept us alive. Perhaps, then, just like physical pain, the pain of rejection evolved as a signal of threat to our lives. And simply watching videos of disapproving faces produced the same effect.
But what about major blows to our need to belong? It turns out that something else happens too, when we get rejected — by spouses, bosses, peers, at work, at school, at home — and it can help us understand not only our struggle for acceptance but the often longing desperation that comes with it. R oy Baumeister is a social scientist who has spent 30 years studying self-esteem, decision making, sexuality, free will and belonging.
In a series of experiments conducted with colleagues since the late s, Baumeister found that following social rejection people become significantly more aggressive, prone to cheating and risk-taking, and unwilling to help others. But despite their swift change in behaviour, the socially rejected subjects showed no evidence of actually feeling hurt.
This puzzled the researchers: it went against their predictions that rejection would trigger negative emotions, which, in turn, would trigger aberrant behaviour. In one study , he and his team divided undergraduates into groups of four to six, gave them some time to mingle, then separated them and asked each one to pick two other students as partners on the next task.
Some participants were told that everyone had picked them, while others were told that no one had. In the end, when all the students rated their feelings, the rejected group showed no change in emotions: instead of feeling upset, they seemed to have become emotionally numb. The same thing happened over and over, no matter how the researchers simulated rejection or measured emotion.
They thought that perhaps the hurt feelings were there but the students felt too embarrassed to admit them. So in another experiment the participants had to rate how they felt about a fellow student who was in significant pain after a leg injury or a romantic breakup.
Once again, though, the socially rejected showed much less empathy, which led to the conclusion that their emotions had indeed shut down. Baumeister calls this phenomenon ego-shock — an allusion to the physical numbness that can follow injury. When you get rejected, Baumeister says, your psyche might similarly freeze up to protect you against the onslaught of emotional pain.
What is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? In one study , Baumeister asked participants to write about a major blow to their self-worth and describe their immediate reaction. Peer rejection was, by far, most frequently recounted, followed by academic and romantic rejection. Moreover, compared with minor incidents, the aftermath of major threats provoked significantly different responses in the subjects.
They were more likely to become disoriented and paralysed, as well as lose their ability to think straight and make decisions. They felt removed from their bodies, as if looking at things from a distance. The world appeared to them unfamiliar and strange. Eventually, people collect themselves, and remember who and where they are. However fleeting, such moments of shock, of utter unguardedness, reveal something about rejection and belonging that normally remains hidden.
We are more than social animals. They place us and ground us into the world. When they see us, they identify us. After all, what is identity but the slow, lifelong accretion of gazes: us looking at ourselves being looked at by others? What we see is, largely, what they see, or what we think they see. And when they turn away, when we become unseen, in a way we cease to be. Nor does it have to be particularly overt. In insidious forms, it lurks woven into the very fabric of society. Poverty, after all, entails a host of risk factors — child maltreatment, drug abuse, crime, unemployment, bad nutrition, inadequate health care — that have been linked to various physical and mental illnesses.
Several interpersonal emotions reflect reactions to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection. Hurt feelings, jealousy, loneliness, shame, guilt, social anxiety, and embarrassment occur when people perceive that their relational value to other people is low or in potential jeopardy.
Other emotions, such as sadness and anger, may accompany these rejection-related emotions, but are reactions to features of the rejection episode other than low relational value. As aversive, if not downright painful, as the subjective features of these emotions sometimes are, they nonetheless serve an important function, motivating people to behave in ways that maintain their relational value and protect their interpersonal relationships, alerting them to threats to those relationships, and prompting them to take action when relational problems arise.
A person who was unable to experience these emotions would be incapable of managing his or her interpersonal interactions and relationships and would likely experience wholesale rejection. Of course, self-perception of one's relational value is sometimes inaccurate, and a good deal of research has examined instances in which people underestimate or overestimate their relational value in other people's eyes.
Importantly, like other systems that monitor the environment for threats, the sociometer seems to be biased in the direction of false positives. This bias reflects a functional feature of the system, decreasing the likelihood that people will miss cues that their relational value is low or declining.
However, the downside is that this bias generates unnecessary distress and sometimes leads people to overreact to relatively benign signs that others do not value their relationship as much as they desire.
This article has focused on negative emotions that arise from perceived low relational value, but positive emotions also arise from interpersonal events. People experience intense happiness, if not joy, when they feel admired, appreciated, or deeply loved, and explicit evidence that one has high relational value—such as being accepted into desired groups, forming friendships, and developing other kinds of social bonds—evokes pleasurable feelings as well.
The fact that a large portion of human emotion is devoted to the maintenance of interpersonal connections points to the importance of acceptance and belonging in human affairs. People are inherently motivated to be valued and accepted by other people, and many of the emotions that they experience reflect these fundamental interpersonal concerns. National Center for Biotechnology Information , U.
Journal List Dialogues Clin Neurosci v. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. Mark R. Author information Copyright and License information Disclaimer. This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Abstract A great deal of human emotion arises in response to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection by other people. Keywords: anger , emotion , guilt , hurt feelings , interpersonal rejection , jealousy , loneliness , shame , social anxiety. Emotional responses to interpersonal rejection Interpersonal rejections constitute some of the most distressing and consequential events in people's lives.
The adaptive significance of emotions Since the publication of Darwin's seminal book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals , 1 theorists have regarded emotions as evolved adaptations that provide an advantage to survival and reproduction. Jealousy People feel jealous when they believe that another person values his or her relationship with them less than they desire because of the presence or intrusion of a third party. Loneliness and homesickness People experience loneliness and homesickness when they believe that people who greatly value their relationship are not available for social interaction and support.
Guilt and shame Guilt and shame are typically conceptualized as reactions to moral or ethical violations which they are , but they are tied closely to people's concerns about relational value and rejection. Social anxiety and embarrassment Social anxiety—feelings of nervousness in social encounters—is an anticipatory response to the possibility of conveying undesired impressions of oneself that will lower one's relational value in other people's eyes.
Sadness and anger Each of the emotions discussed thus far expressly involves events that have implications for people's relational value and social relationships, and each appears designed to deter actions that might result in rejection or, if such actions have already occurred, to manage the interpersonal threat to one's social connections.
Conclusion Several interpersonal emotions reflect reactions to real, anticipated, remembered, or imagined rejection. Darwin C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. LeDoux JE. Evolution of human emotion: a view through fear. Prog Brain Res. Cosmides L. Evolutionary psychology and the emotions. Handbook of Emotions. New York, NY: Guilford; — Baumeister RF. The need to belong: desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation.
Psychol Bull. Leary MR. Sociometer theory and the pursuit of relational value: getting to the root of self-esteem. Eur Rev Soc Psychol. DeWall CN. Psychol Sci. Eisenberger NI. Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion. Burklun L. The face of rejection: Rejection sensitivity moderates dorsal anterior cingulated cortex activity to disapproving facial expressions.
Soc Neurosci. Kross E. Neural dynamics of rejection sensitivity. J Cogn Neurosci. Masten CL. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. Onoda K. Decreased ventral anterior cingulate cortex activity is associated with reduced social pain during emotional support.
Neural pathways link social support to attenuated neuroendocrine stress responses. The neural sociometer: Brain mechanisms underlying state self-esteem. Rotge J. L'Abate L. Vangelisti A. Feeling Hurt in Close Relationships. The nature of hurt feelings: emotional experience and cognitive appraisals. In: Vangelisti A, ed. The causes, phenomenology, and consequences of hurt feelings.
J Pers Soc Psychol. Buss DM. Guerrero LK. Today, thanks to electronic communications, social media platforms and dating apps, each of us is connected to thousands of people, any of whom might ignore our posts, chats, texts, or dating profiles and leave us feeling rejected as a result. In addition to these kinds of minor rejections, we are still vulnerable to serious and more devastating rejections as well.
When our spouse leaves us, when we get fired from our jobs, snubbed by our friends, or ostracized by our families and communities for our lifestyle choices, the pain we feel can be absolutely paralyzing.
Whether the rejection we experience is large or small, one thing remains constant — it always hurts, and it usually hurts more than we expect it to. The question is, why? Why does it ruin our mood?
Why would something so seemingly insignificant make us feel angry at our friend, moody, and bad about ourselves? The greatest damage rejection causes is usually self-inflicted.
Just when our self-esteem is hurting most, we go and damage it even further. The answer is — our brains are wired to respond that way. When scientists placed people in functional MRI machines and asked them to recall a recent rejection , they discovered something amazing. The same areas of our brain become activated when we experience rejection as when we experience physical pain. Evolutionary psychologists believe it all started when we were hunter gatherers who lived in tribes.
Since we could not survive alone, being ostracized from our tribe was basically a death sentence.
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