on the potentially incapacitating noxious pain of social exclusion, rejection or loss.
leave it to life to knock me upside the head for meandering through a thought like yesterday's...
when Nicole and Anne's moms were lost to breast cancer, when Robin's father was lost to metastatic brain tumors and her mother Diane was then taken by breast cancer a few years later, yesterday when John didn't come in to work because his dad was waiting on the results of a cancer diagnosis (on Friday i had initiated a conversation with him about health and predisposition, self and family, brilliant timing natalie). and then tonight when Cookie went through the ordeal of diagnosing her three-month old kitten with a neural bacterial infection and had to put him down... i suppose i recall the weight that comes down on my heart when people i love suffer.
"it is conceivable that brain circuits for separation distress represent an evolutionary elaboration of an endorphin-based pain network" -Panksepp
sure, it is sensible to propose that noxious pain accompanying an emotional event would serve to focus attention to that event to promote correction and future avoidance. such an adaptation would promote inclusive fitness: death of genetic kin, sexual jealousy, rap and childlessness as noxiously painful stimuli, recognized as aversive would be avoided.
social and physical pain have been shown to share the opioid and oxytocin neuroendocrine systems that work through the cingulate gyrus and periaquaductal gray [as a side note, the PAG is also a sexually dimorphic region specializing in aggressive behavior... larger and more active in males...].
social integration used to mean survival to us. now, we're so hell-bent on independence and establishing self sufficiency that we seemingly strive to eliminate this integration - this is just one example of modern social exclusion, but the first that comes to mind. if we look at our closest cousins, they form strong relationships within their social network because connections to certain individuals mean connectedness to tools of protection, reproduction and food. the most strongly integrated animals are the most likely to survive... this is because we are one of many many species who learn through imitation.
okay. so connectedness is important, and social exclusion can be equivalent to death. therefore, social animals needed physiological mechanisms to help them react to threats of social exclusion, and avoid them. interdependence.
evolutionary theory would suggest something like... as more complex social networks arose, complex response systems within physiological correlates of behaviour probably became associated with already existing mechanisms of threat defense... drumroll... the nociceptive system. [as another side note i loooooove this system. mm.]
if you throw a lobster into a pot of boiling water, it will flap its tail and appear to be trying to climb out. this is actually a nociceptive reflex wherein pain nerves are activated by the heat and recruit a network of other nerves to move the tail in such a way as to quickly escape the threat. this is the same system on which social pain would supervene... but lobsters don't have an emotional correlate to pain [i've written about this before... don't remember when...].
noxious pain gives information about tissue damage to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord and the periaquaductal gray (PAG). the affective experience of pain depicted by activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus that signals an aversive state and motivates behaviour to escape the noxious stimulus. and it is this affective component whose circuit social pain might directly utilize. hot.
these two circuits - physical and social pain circuits - could become associated through very early-on sensory experiences... with physical pain and separation. for instance, when an infant experiences physical discomfort, it is alleviated by physical contact with the maternal figure - what Bowlby calls the attachment figure (1970's). however, this simultaneously teaches the infant that isolation and physical pain go together.
on a more physiological level, it has been demonstrated that the opiates released in infants when physical pain is alleviated during attachment are stimulated to do so by the PAG. this same pain inhibition in the dorsal horn by opiate stimulation from the PAG occurs when adults experiencing social exclusion related pain - death, sexual jealousy, etc. - are able to alleviate it through social attachment. and when they are isolated or cannot otherwise inhibit the affective component of pain, endogenous opioid production does not occur.
freaking cool that social pain to promote survival in social animals may have developed by mapping onto the more primitive mechanism of noxious pain.
so in other words, fuck you, modern independence epidemic. every social or affective pain i have ever experience - death, social exclusion, medical or financial crisis - has been ameliorated by a hug.
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