What is the bases of the pain of rejected love?

The experience of emotional pain

It has been some time since I read two very different articles about pain that we, our consortium, found interesting. Simply put the pain we experience following the rejection by someone we love is much like our brain’s response to physical conditions like touching a hot stove. Ethan Kross and his colleagues reported these research findings in the March (2011) issue of the proceedings of the national academy of sciences. Functional magnetic imaging was used to map brain activity when seeing an ex-partner’s picture and being burned on the skin. These two conditions produced very patterns of brain activity. So when we talk about the pain of a lost relationship it is not just a metaphor but also the real thing.

What happens to our emotional world when we cannot experience pain? What would loss feel like without a pain mechanism? In the March 23 issue of nature. Frank Zufall and colleagues studied 3 people who had mutations in the scn9a gene who could not experience pain (such as after breaking bones). The nature report emphasized that these same individuals had no sense of smell and provided some of the neural details of how this anomaly occurs.

I wish we could put the research teams together, the ones who studied individuals who could not experience and those who studied the brain response to rejection. What is the emotional life like of someone who has no pain response? What is the experience of rejection for them? How is the emotional development and life of someone for whom pain is just a word?