Social Pain, Physical Pain: Different After All?

In a paper just published, a group of neuroscientists report that they've changed their minds about how the brain processes social pain. Here's the paper: Separate neural representations for physical pain and social rejection The authors are Choong-Wan Woo and colleagues of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Woo et al. say that, based on a new analysis of fMRI brain scanning data, they've found evidence inconsistent with the popular theory that the brain responds to the 'pain' of social rejection using the same circuitry that encodes physical pain. Rather, it seems that although the two kinds of pain do engage broadly the same areas, they do so in very different ways. Interestingly, three years ago this same group of researchers argued that social pain and physical pain are processed in the same way by the brain. That was back in 2011 with their highly-cited paper in