Being rejected hurts a lot. A team of researchers at the UCLA say so. In the October 10th issue of ‘Science’ (Imagine captain Picard saying ‘Science. The next frontier’) they report that two key areas in the brain respond to the pain of rejection in the same way as physical pain.
They used a neat way to provoke these hurt feelings: undergraduates (sic!) were sometimes included or sometimes excluded from playing a ‘virtual ball tossing game’ with a partner. Hey wait:
“It’s really the most boring game you can imagine, except at one point one of the two computer people stop throwing the ball to the real player”
The researchers theorize that the pain of being rejected has evolved because of the importance of surviving together, particularly in mammals. What would be more interesting to know is how humans have learnt to deal with this pain. Being rejected is so common nowadays that it looks like nobody cares about others anymore.