This Is Your Brain On Rejection

By Alice Park

Ever wonder why you feel so physically rotten when your date doesn't call the next day? It turns out that it's your brain rather than your heart that takes snubbing the hardest. Researchers at UCLA and Macquarie University in Australia have shown that physical pain and the more psychological pain of rejection are processed by the same areas of the brain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, which records an active brain at work, they tracked college students as they played a three-person computer game designed to exclude one player. When a student was snubbed, two areas of the brain critical to generating feelings of physical pain and to developing emotions became more active (one area shown at right). Feeling the pain of social snubbing may have evolved as a survival mechanism to keep people connected to the safety of a larger group.