The Experimental Study Of Social Pain And Physical Pain On Cognitive Task Performance

Social pain and physiological pain are both belong to the category of the pain experience, induced by certain conditions. They respectively affect human’s physiology and mentality, they have similar function. Social pain means the negative emotion reaction when individual notice the threat of his needed social connections or the damage of his social relationships. Social pain belongs to the category of emotional pain, have a close relationship with physiological pain. This paper believes that as social pain and physiological pain this two kind of pain, they both can bring individual strong and stimulate pain. To some extent, the effect of physiological pain is always very short, while the effect of social pain can last very long. This paper intends to find out how much pain an individual would reflect after the individual recall and re-experience the social pain and physiological pain, and compare the differences of recall, re-experience pain and the original pain.This study require the tested individual to recall the pain experience, and state the process of the event, the details and the feelings at the time. In experiment 1 (within-subjects design), the tested individual is required to recall the pain degree and emotion changes when they have social pain or physiological pain, this is to verify Compare with recalling the physiological pain, if recall social pain would bring a higher level of pain. In experiment 2 and 3 (within-subjects design), the tested individual is required to accomplish a cognitive task after recalling a pain experience. Set the performance of cognitive task as dependent variable, based on the premise of experiment 1’s hypothesis is correct, verify that if the tested individual would have different cognitive performance when suffering social pain and physiological pain. When facing difficult problem, if the tested individual would performance worse when suffering social pain.This study at last come to the conclusion as below:The operations used in the international research of social pain and physiological pains still valid in China, Chinese would have the same emotional experience and reaction.Under the background of Chinese culture, when recalling social pain and physiological pain, people still can detail the process of the pain event and cause corresponding pain experience.Compare with recall physiological pain, recall social pain would cause a deeper degree of pain, the differences of sexuality, the time interval of pain, the numbers of words used to describe the pain event, and the times of informing others about the pain event wouldn’t make a difference when recalling the social pain and physiological pain.Recall social pain event and physiological pain event will affect the performance of cognitive task:(1) Compare with recalling physiological pain event, recalling social pain event would cause a worse performance for the tested individual.(2)Compare with recalling physiological pain event, the tested individual would performance worse recalling social pain event when facing difficult problem.The result of this study basically come to a similar conclusion with formal experiments, but there are also differences. This study has important practical significance for the further explore of social pain under Chinese background and the relational research for social exclusion and interpersonal preference. For the research about the social pain of middle-aged or aged group and intimate relationship, this study also have certain reference significance.