Feeling Hurt: Revisiting the Relationship Between Social and Physical Pain

Abstract

Pain overlap theory has generated decades of controversy and still receives considerable research attention. A major advance has been the revelation that social and physical pain activate similar neural regions, providing suggestive evidence of a “piggybacked” alarm system that coevolved to detect social exclusion. Recent developments, however, have brought neural evidence for pain overlap into question. We analyze these developments from a social psychological perspective and identify the need for a reformulated approach. To meet this need, we provide a framework that a priori predicts generalized overlap and specific divergence across a range of biopsychosocial domains. The framework point..