Paper Title
Alone but feeling no pain: Effects of social exclusion on physical pain tolerance and pain threshold, affective forecasting, and interpersonal empathy
Keywords
- Social Exclusion
- Physical Pain Tolerance
- Pain Threshold
- Emotional Numbness
- Affective Forecasting
- Emotional Insensitivity
- Pain Sensitivity
- Interpersonal Empathy
- Emotional Distress
- Social Exclusion Effects
- Pain and Emotion
- Empathizing with Suffering
- Forecasting Joy
- Romantic Breakup
- Broken Leg
- Insensitivity to Emotion
Research Impact Tools
Publication Info
Volume: 91 | Issue: 1 | Pages: 1–15
Published On
July, 2006
Downloads
FULL PDF
Abstract
Prior findings of emotional numbness (rather than distress) among socially excluded persons led the authors to investigate whether exclusion causes a far-reaching insensitivity to both physical and emotional pain. Experiments 1-4 showed that receiving an ostensibly diagnostic forecast of a lonesome future life reduced sensitivity to physical pain, as indicated by both (higher) thresholds and tolerance. Exclusion also caused emotional insensitivity, as indicated by reductions in affective forecasting of joy or woe over a future football outcome (Experiment 3), as well as lesser empathizing with another person's suffering from either romantic breakup (Experiment 4) or a broken leg (Experiment 5). The insensitivities to pain and emotion were highly intercorrelated.
View more »