Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (10 page)

The results help us understand the functions of the dACC better.
Historically, the dACC has been framed as supporting either
cognitive or emotional functions, with recent trends supporting the former.
We posited that the dACC supports both cognitive
and
emotional functions.
Specifically, we suggested that the dACC is an alarm system with this region serving both as a detection system (cognitive) and as a sounding mechanism (emotional).
The data here demonstrates that while the dACC is activated by a standard error detection task, the strength of activity in the dACC is also linked to the emotional experience of making an error.

Take Two Aspirin

Our basic findings linking social exclusion
to dACC activity have been replicated in a number of studies and extended to people experiencing grief over the death of a loved one, remembering a recent romantic breakup, being negatively evaluated, and even just looking at disapproving faces.
Toward the beginning of this chapter, I told the story of the doctor who had three patients, the first two with physical ailments and the third with a broken heart.
The doctor prescribed painkillers for all three.
In the context of a broken heart, this seemed farfetched.
Nevertheless, when we give talks about our fMRI work on social pain, it is not uncommon for someone to come up after and open with some variant of “What do you tell someone who has just been rejected?
Take two aspirin and call me in the morning?”

Although I was deliberately dismissive of this idea at the beginning of the chapter, the real answer is, “Well, yes, sort of.”
Nathan DeWall, together with Naomi Eisenberger and other social rejection researchers, conducted a series of studies to test out the idea that
over-the-counter painkillers would reduce social pain
, not just physical pain.
In the first study, they looked at two groups of people.
Half of them took 1,000 milligrams a day of acetaminophen (that is, Tylenol), and half of them took equivalently sized placebo pills with no active substances in them.
Both groups took their pills every day
for three weeks.
Each night, the participants answered questions by e-mail regarding the amount of social pain they had felt that day.
By the ninth day of the study, the Tylenol group was reporting feeling less social pain than the placebo group.
Moreover, between the ninth day and the twenty-first day, the difference between the two groups kept widening.
Neither group knew what they were ingesting.
Yet taking the painkiller we reach for to make a headache go away seems to help make our feelings of heartache go away too.

This first behavioral study was followed by an fMRI study.
Participants once again took either Tylenol or a placebo every day for three weeks and then were scanned while playing
Cyberball
.
At first, they were included in the videogame for a few minutes, and then they were left out for the rest of the game.
Those who had been taking placebo pills for three weeks responded similarly to the subjects in our earlier
Cyberball
fMRI studies.
They showed greater activity in the dACC and the anterior insula regions of the brain when they were excluded from the game, compared with when they were included in the game.
In contrast, those who had been taking Tylenol for three weeks showed no dACC or insula response to being rejected.
Taking Tylenol had made the brain’s pain network less sensitive to the pain of rejection.

Another study made the direct link between the dACC findings and Panksepp’s original opioid hypothesis of social and physical pain.
Naomi Eisenberger worked with Baldwin Way to find a genetic trait that relates to social pain.
They focused on the muopioid receptor because of its role in medicating pain.
Mice that have been bred to lack the mu-opioid receptor
no longer respond to morphine.
In humans, the experience of pain depends in part on the mu-opioid receptor gene (called OPRM1).
Within this gene there are three variations (“polymorphisms”) at a particular spot on the gene that alter how much the gene will be expressed.
Each of us has two alleles that determine which polymorphism we have.
We inherit one allele from our mother
and one from our father.
Each can be an A or a G; thus, each of us is an A/A, A/G, or G/G.
Prior pain studies have demonstrated that G/Gs are more sensitive to physical pain (for example, they require greater quantities of morphine to deal with postoperative pain).

Genetic samples were obtained from a group of individuals
in order to determine which variant of the OPRM1 gene they had.
They were also asked to indicate how sensitive they were to social rejection in their everyday life.
Those with the G/G variant of the OPRM1 gene (that is, those likely to be more sensitive to physical pain) reported being more sensitive to social rejection than those with the other variants.
A subset of these individuals also participated in an fMRI
Cyberball
study, and the same genetic pattern held with respect to the dACC and anterior insula activity they produced when rejected.
G/Gs produced more activity in these regions when rejected than other participants.
My sense is that the Tylenol and opioid studies were what really convinced a lot of scientists that social and physical pain are really making use of the same pain equipment in the brain.
People may not know much about specific brain regions, but from personal experience most know something about painkillers.
Tylenol’s effects seem really selective to pain—it doesn’t dull our mind or distract us from pain through pleasant feelings.
It seems to zero in and target something specific to pain.
To see these drugs diminishing our social pain as well as physical pain speaks strongly to the connection between the two kinds of pain.

Sticks and Stones

In the abstract,
Cyberball
seems like a trivial game with a trivial outcome.
Two “strangers” that you have never met stop throwing a digital ball to you in the most boring game of catch you will ever play.
How is this relevant to anything that matters in your life?
Being included by others when playing
Cyberball
won’t help you get better clothes, the job, or the girl.
As a participant, you get
paid the same for the study whether you are included or excluded.
Everything about this study seems small and insignificant.
But the implications are profound—that something so small produces such dramatic effects.
Our sensitivity to social rejection is so central to our well-being that our brains treat it like a painful event, whether the instance of social rejection matters or not.

Figure 3.4 The Müller-Lyer Illusion

Consider visual illusions like the one in
Figure 3.4
, the Müller-Lyer illusion.
People experience line
A
as longer than line
B
even though they are identical in length.
Why?
The human visual system makes various assumptions
about what different visual cues in the environment imply, and it uses those assumptions to make sense of the complex world around us.
In the Müller-Lyer illusion, the shape of the arrows at the ends of the lines is key.
Line
B
has arrows that if extended, suggest that you are looking at the edge of two walls joining together close to you.
In contrast, line
A
has arrows suggesting that two walls are meeting far away in the distance.
Vertical lines of the same length hit your retina, but the arrows lead your brain to infer that line
A
is far away and line
B
is close up.
The brain knows that identical retinal projections should be experienced as differing in size based on their distance.
If our brains didn’t do this, we would be terrified as people walked away from us and shrank until they disappeared.

Look at
Figure 3.4
again.
Now you know the trick, but the illusion persists.
You will always see line
A
as longer than line
B
.
This illusion is trivial, just like
Cyberball
, yet we continue to experience both effects.
Kip Williams found that even when he told people
they were just playing against a computer and that the computer was preset to reject them, people still experienced social pain.
Making quick visual assessments and feeling pain in response to social exclusion were both so critical to survival in our evolutionary past that these effects cannot be easily mitigated.

We have already discussed at length the reasons why mammals, and particularly humans, need to feel social separation as painful.
It keeps infants and caregivers close together.
That may have been the reason evolution gave us social pain, but now we are stuck with it our entire lives, and it colors almost every social experience we have.
Remarkably, though, despite its ubiquity, we don’t understand this central aspect of our nature.

Imagine you have a thirteen-year-old son, Dennis, who is physically assaulted at school by a bully.
The bully pushes Dennis down and hits him several times.
What do you do when you find out?
March into the principal’s office?
Call the police to press charges?
Write to the local paper to express outrage at what is happening in our schools?
Different parents would do any and all of these things.
Now imagine that your Dennis is being bullied, but only in words.
The bully never lays a hand on your son, but he teases him mercilessly, telling him that he is ugly and stupid and that no one likes him (none of these things are true).
When Dennis reluctantly tells you about the teasing, what is your reaction then?
Does it involve the police or local press?
Not likely.
More probably, your response will be something like this: “Just ignore him.
You will be off to college in a few years, and he will probably be flipping burgers for the rest of his life.”
I don’t mean to suggest that it isn’t distressing to find out that your son has been teased, but it isn’t the same as finding out that there was physical contact.
We don’t go to the
principal, police, or press in this case because we don’t think any of them will take action if it’s just verbal teasing.

From a young age, we teach children to say, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
But this isn’t true.
Bullying hurts so much not because one individual is rejecting us but because we tend to believe that the bully speaks for others—that if we are being singled out by the bully, then we are probably unliked and unwanted by most.
Otherwise,
why would all those others watch the bully
tease us rather than stepping in to help support us?
Absence of support is taken as a sign of mass rejection.

I bring up bullying because at a societal level, it is probably the most pervasive form of social rejection we have.
Studies from around the world, including the United States, England, Germany, Finland, Japan, South Korea, and Chile, suggest that between the ages of twelve and sixteen,
about 10 percent of students are bullied
on a regular basis.
Although bullying can involve physical aggression, more than 85 percent of bullying events do not.
Instead,
they involve belittling comments
and making the victims the subjects of rumors.
But victims of bullying suffer long after school is over and the bully has gone home.
These individuals are seven times more likely than other children to report being depressed.
They think about committing suicide more
, and they are four times as likely as others to make a suicide attempt.
Sadly, they are also more likely to succeed in their attempts.
A 1989 Finnish study assessed the level of victimization
among eight-year-olds from a sample of more than 5,000 students.
Those who had been bullied at age eight were more than six times as likely to have actually taken their own lives by the age of twenty-five.
Suicide-related thoughts are actually quite similar
among those who have been victims of bullying and those who have been victims of chronic physical pain, further supporting the link between these two kinds of pain.

Throughout our lives, we are destined to experience different forms of social rejection and loss.
Most of us go through multiple
relationship breakups, and we typically spend a portion of those on the side of being left, rather than leaving.
Such breakups often feel unbearable, and they can dramatically alter how we view ourselves and our lives for a long time after.
Our Faustian evolutionary bargain allows us as humans to develop slowly outside the womb, to adapt to specific cultures and environments, and to grow the most encephalized brains on the planet.
But it requires us to pay for it with the possibility of pain, real pain, every time we connect with another human being who has the power to leave us or withhold love.
Evolution made its bet that suffering was an acceptable price to pay for all the rewards of being human.