http://www.livescience.com/5966-pain-pil...lings.html
Getting the snub from friends can feel like a slap in the face. Now researchers say treating such social pain may be as easy as popping a pain pill. They warn, however, that more research is needed before anyone tries the approach.
The finding builds on research showing that psychological blows not only feel like they hurt us, they actually do. For instance, scientists have found a gene linked with both physical pain and a person's sensitivity to rejection. And some of the same brain regions are linked with both pain types.
So perhaps it's not surprising that a painkiller would alleviate both as well.
"The idea that a drug designed to alleviate physical pain should reduce the pain of social rejection seemed simple and straightforward based on what we know about neural overlap between social and physical pain systems," said lead researcher C. Nathan DeWall of the University of Kentucky. "To my surprise, I couldn't find anyone who had ever tested this idea.
The study, which posits an expanded view of how the human brain processes different kinds of pain, is published in the journal Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“Pain exists in many forms, including the distress that people feel when exposed to thoughts of existential uncertainty and death,” says Randles.
“Our study suggests these anxieties may be processed as ‘pain’ by the brain — but Tylenol seems to inhibit the signal telling the brain that something is wrong.”
The study builds on recent American research that found acetaminophen — the generic form of Tylenol — can successfully reduce the non-physical pain of being ostracized from friends.
Prior research has also determined that when the richness, order and meaning in life is threatened — with thoughts of death, for instance — people tend to reassert their basic values as a coping mechanism.
anterior cingulate cortex activates in response to situations where there is a possibility of the environment producing unpredictable consequences. When our predictions of how things should go turn out to be inaccurate, the ACC lights up and tries to figure out where the error occurred. This discrepancy between prediction and outcome is what causes us some anxiety. It seems that chronic administration of Tylenol counteracts this response.
Whether or not the ACC activates determines the emotional response that is produced by the situation, and the difference is quite interesting. It turns out that without the activation the ACC, violations of expectations produce humor rather than anxiety. This is fundamentally how comedy works. An expectation is set up, then it is violated in an interesting way, and hilarity ensues. As it turns out, there is a fine line between situation that are scary and ones that are funny. And a way to move that line seems to be taking acetaminophen.
http://qz.com/77004/do-it-all-drug-can-t...xiety-too/
http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/...nxiety.htm
http://www.chron.com/life/healthzone/art...442777.php