[Brain basis of physical pain and social pain]

Increasing studies have provided cognitive and neuron evidence for not only the similarities, but also the differences between physical pain and social pain in the brain basis. Comparing the similarities and differences of the brain basis of physical pain and social pain helps us to clarify the mechanism of the occurrence and change of pain, and provide theoretical evidence for clinical pain treatment. In this review, we summarized studies to delineate the brain mechanisms of physical pain and social pain. Through the review of existing studies, we found that both physical pain and social pain can invoke the same brain regions that process emotional experience (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula), emotion regulation (lateral prefrontal cortex) and somatosensory (the posterior insula, secondary sensory cortex). However, the voxel-level activated patterns of physical and social pain differ in the same brain region (dorsal anterior cingulate gyrus, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, etc.), and the overlapping brain regions (for example, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) have varied effect on these two types of pain. In addition, studies have shown that the brain activation pattern for social pain may be influenced by the experimental paradigm. Future studies should actively adopt a data-driven way to examine the brain basis of physical pain and social pain, especially the nerve activation mode, aiming to consummate the theory of pain.