Neuroscience now points to rejection causing physical pain: how do we treat and address social exclusion?

Science is showing the connection between emotional and physical pain: "Researchers have found, for example, that social rejection doesn’t have to be explicit to trigger the brain’s pain mechanism: just seeing a picture of your ex-partner or even a video of disapproving faces activates the same neural pathways as physical pain does. At one point, Eisenberger and her team posed a seemingly daft question: if physical and emotional pain are related, could a painkiller relieve heartache? In the study that followed, some participants took two daily doses of Tylenol (a common painkiller) for three weeks while others took a placebo, and each group recorded their day-to-day emotions in a diary. By the end of the experiment, the Tylenol group reported less distress and showed less brain activity in the pain regions after being rejected than the placebo group."

Fascinating, and so many implications.