ogc163
Superstar
One spring day on Long Island, I perused hundreds of photos of single, dateable men on a computer. One man had a thick, black mane — he was a stylist in Manhattan’s Koreatown — and was hugging a smiley pug. Did I like him? Awww: I clicked Very Likely Yes. One man was a banker: Definitely No: sorry, bankers. One was a thirty-something, chiseled-featured man with an orange plaid scarf casually knotted around his neck, whom I’ll call Matthew for his resemblance to a young McConaughey. Dang. Definitely Yes.
Ten minutes later, a response from Matthew flashed across the screen. Both our profile pictures appeared, side-by-side, with the text: “Does this person like you? Very likely no.”
At that moment, if all was functioning well inside me, my parasympathetic nervous system slowed my heart rate and contracted my stomach and airways. My brain’s endogenous opioid system began to release painkillers. If I had previously been injected with displaceable radiotracers that had bound to the pain receptors in my brain, a PET scanner would have shown them being knocked off, as my own opioids replaced them, kicking into action to dampen the pain of rejection.
“Does this person like you? Very likely no.”
Scientists know that this is what a healthy body does in the wake of a social rejection. But Matthew himself had no body; he wasn’t a real person; and what “he” had just dealt me was an automated, computerized, impersonal rejection. Matthew was a lab-simulated online dating profile designed for a “social feedback task” by Dr. David T. Hsu, a professor of psychiatry at Stony Brook University.
Neuroscientists have discovered that people suffer and recover from the pain of rejection the same way they process physical pain. Hsu’s work was inspired by Dr. Naomi Eisenberger’s 2003 paper “Does rejection hurt?” which examined the sensations of emotional pain that people feel when they’ve been socially rejected. Emotional and physical pain overlap so closely that one can exacerbate the other — and, spookily, can also be alleviated the same way: in a 2010 study, Dr. C. Nathan DeWall’s team at the University of Kentucky showed that popping acetaminophen could quell the pain of a negative social experience.
Hsu and other scientists have developed a hilarious set of lab tasks for stimulating people’s responses to rejection. One such paradigm is Cyberball, where simulated computer game players exclude the test subject from joining them in playing the game. Another task exposes the test subjects to pictures of people frowning at them — and not just real people, but people in paintings by Renoir and Hopper. Then there’s my favorite, the “Future Alone” paradigm. The experimenter administers a personality test to the subject, then breaks some bad news: “You’re the type who will end up alone later in life.” After administering tasks like these, researchers record the subjects’ responses, which run the gamut from impulsiveness to self-regulation, depression, or anger. “There was one experiment where, in the waiting area, they put out cookies,” said Hsu. “Given the negative information, you tend to eat more cookies.”
Hsu, whose mentor studied how the body’s natural, or endogenous, opioid system responds to physical pain, hypothesized that people’s bodies might respond to social pain the same way. Hsu’s research found that the body will optimally respond to a rejection with a flood of opioids that bond to pain receptors in the brain and dial down the negative emotions. But that was only the beginning: Hsu went on to find that the brains of patients who have depression release far fewer opioids, which contributes to a lingering feeling of depression and pain after negative social experiences. Some of us just feel rejection harder and longer. In fact, psychiatric illness may not only exacerbate the feeling of rejection, but also may be caused by the rejections themselves.
In his most recent work, Hsu’s investigating why people respond in different ways to social rejection, by withdrawing, by becoming depressed, by using drugs or alcohol, or by becoming aggressive. His research goal is to find direct applications for treating patients within dynamic, ongoing social environments that don’t necessarily offer healing or improvement once they’ve walked out of the lab. “If someone becomes depressed, because they just broke up with their significant other, and they go to see a psychiatrist, they’re still in that environment of being single or broken-up. It’s not like a punctuated, single event: ‘I just broke up with boyfriend or girlfriend, now I’m depressed, now there’s this thing called depression I have to deal with now.’ They’re still interacting with that event, beyond their diagnosis.”
But in order to study responses to rejection, Hsu first has to make the rejection happen. His own laboratory task is tweakable for different research needs, but for the unrecorded, demo scenario he prepared for me, the task required me to write a simulated dating profile and “like” the profiles of simulated potential “dates.” I would in turn be liked, or rejected, by those dates.
But in order to study responses to rejection, Hsu first has to make the rejection happen.
Here is the kicker, the corollary finding to Hsu’s work: because his test groups often include people with psychiatric illnesses, as well as mentally well control group subjects, Hsu’s methodology foregrounds full disclosure and transparency with all of his subjects, in deference to everybody’s health. Hsu and his research team always explicitly prepare subjects to expect a randomized, computerized, simulated rejection from “people” who the subjects know, for a fact, do not actually exist. And yet, regardless of how well-prepared and aware the test subjects think they are, and regardless of their mental health, the simulated rejections still result in a perceptible, measurable eruption of rejection throes. People indicate in their responses that they feel hurt or unhappy — and Hsu can record the radiotracers being knocked off their receptors, while their bodies try to dull the pain.
“If it was a real-life experience, meaning I did use deception, there’s no doubt that I may elicit stronger responses. But I’ve shown, as well as other people have, that even if people know it’s not real, these social exclusion experiments, they still respond strongly,” Hsu said. “You still respond to it. You still are sensitive. But I’ll even go further and say I believe that human beings are hard-wired or innately equipped to be sensitive to cues of rejection or exclusion, because the need to belong is such a powerful motivation and instinct.”
