ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND, July 27, 2008: Love really does hurt, just as poets and song lyric writers claim. New brain scanning technologies are revealing that the part of the brain that processes physical pain also deals with emotional pain. And in the same way that in some people injury can cause long-lasting chronic pain, science now reveals why some will never get over such heartbreak.
Professor Alexander is director of the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research. He led the psychiatric team that first responded to the Piper Alpha oil-rig disaster. Since then, he has been involved in helping survivors of many disasters including the Asian tsunami, the war in Iraq and, most recently, the earthquake in Pakistan. Professor Alexander is not surprised about the link between physical and emotional pain: “If you listen to people who are damaged emotionally, they will often translate their pain into physical similes: ‘My head is bursting, my guts are aching’ and so on. The parallel is very strong.”
But medical research has tended to concentrate on physical pain. Neuroscientist Mary Frances O’Connor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is one of the scientists who have propelled emotional pain up the research agenda. “We’re at a very new time when we can use technologies to look at the brain and the heart,” she says.