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Brain basis of physical pain and social pain

CHENG Si¹, LI Si-Jin¹, ZHENG Zi-Xin¹, ZHANG Dan-Dan^1,2,*

¹School of Psychology, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China；²Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science, Shenzhen 518055, China

Abstract

Increasing studies have provided cognitive and neuron evidence for not only the similarities, but also the differences between physical pain and social pain in the brain basis. Comparing the similarities and differences of the brain basis of physical pain and social pain helps us to clarify the mechanism of the occurrence and change of pain, and provide theoretical evidence for clinical pain treatment. In this review, we summarized studies to delineate the brain mechanisms of physical pain and social pain. Through the review of existing studies, we found that both physical pain and social pain can invoke the same brain regions that process emotional experience (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula), emotion regulation (lateral prefrontal cortex) and somatosensory (the posterior insula, secondary sensory cortex). However, the voxel-level activated patterns of physical and social pain differ in the same brain region (dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, etc.), and the overlapping brain regions (for example, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) have varied effect on these two types of pain. In addition, studies have shown that the brain activation pattern for social pain may be influenced by the experimental paradigm. Future studies should actively adopt a data-driven way to examine the brain basis of physical pain and social pain, especially the nerve activation mode, aiming to consummate the theory of pain.

Key words: physical pain; social pain; anterior cingulate cortex; insula; lateral prefrontal cortex

Received: 　　Accepted:

Corresponding author: 张丹丹　　E-mail: zhangdd05@gmail.com

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2022.0062

Citing This Article：

CHENG Si, LI Si-Jin, ZHENG Zi-Xin, ZHANG Dan-Dan. Brain basis of physical pain and social pain. Acta Physiol Sin 2022; 74 (4): 669-677 (in Chinese with English abstract).