Many mothers offer their young children a hand to squeeze as they brave a vaccination in the doctor’s office. We instinctively know that contact with a loved one can help mitigate pain—and the scientific evidence concurs. Now two recent studies show that a mere reminder of an absent beloved—a photograph—can deliver the same relief.
A Psychological Science study in 2009 first showed the effect. Psychologist Sarah Master of the University California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues studied 25 women and their boyfriends of more than six months. The researchers subjected the women to different degrees of thermal stimulation—a sharp, prickling sensation—as they either held their boyfriend’s hand while he sat behind a curtain, held the hand of a male stranger behind a curtain, viewed a photograph of their boyfriend or viewed a photograph of a male stranger. Holding their partner’s hand or viewing his photo decreased the women’s pain significantly more than touching or viewing a stranger—and the photo was just as effective as the physical contact.
A more recent study in the October issue of PLoS One peered inside the brain to better understand how love soothes pain. Neuroscientist Jarred Younger of Stanford University and his colleagues recruited 15 students who were in the first nine months of a new and passionate relationship. While lying inside a functional MRI machine, the participants focused on photographs of their partners or on pictures of similarly attractive acquaintances, or they played a word association game. During these distractions, the experimenters applied mild, medium or painful temperatures to the students’ palms. Images of attractive acquaintances were not very effective painkillers, but gazing at the faces of significant others and playing the word game reduced reported pain on average between 36 and 44 percent and high pain between 12 and 13 percent.
Only photos of loved ones, however, sparked activity in reward centers within the amygdala, hypothalamus and medial orbitofrontal cortex. The faces of romantic partners also decreased activity in major pain-processing areas, such as the left and right posterior insula. Because the reward centers did not flutter in response to the distracting word game, the researchers argue that the salve of romantic affection is not mere distraction—it is a bliss as potent as that of drugs such as cocaine, which invigorate the same pleasure pathways.
A photograph may not need to show a significant other to produce analgesic effects—any loved one could do, thinks neuroscientist Lucy Brown of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, who was not involved with the study. “Whether a photo of a boyfriend or girlfriend works better than one of your spouse, child or beloved pet, I’m not so sure,” she says. So the next time you have to squeeze into a cramped airplane seat or trudge to work with a bad cold, consider bringing a picture of someone you love to make things more bearable.
This article was originally published with the title When Photos Are Painkillers.
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5 Comments
Add CommentIt is true that images that are more like thought (or creations of thought -- like photographs) have more of an interactive impact on us than what has been previously understood. Dream vision, as an example, is more like thought because it is relatively shifting and variable (like thought).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTelevision, in going father than photographs, has the further effect of emotional numbing. TV is an emotional euphoric, or emotional painkiller; and it causes depression and anxiety. Hence, it is correctly known as the "plug-in drug".
Two things;
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1) Author is a strange first name.
2) While I find most TV to be depressing and worthless, I must ask if you have any actual science behind your condemnation of it?
Television is an inert physical object and will only hurt you if someone throws it at you. Television programs, on the other hand can and do span a wide continuum of subject matter, content, treatment and presentation; perhaps some of them may influence human thought and emotion, or numb it, but I am surprised by your sweeping generalizations. Also, it's got nothing to do with the article! Personally I can attest to this phenomenon, and would like to see more studies done that are larger and longer; 15 do not make much of a statistical impact; at least 300 are needed before you begin to approach any significance at all. Still, an interesting idea.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is far more to this discussion than meets the eye.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn follow-up to my prior posting, I also offer the following in order to make this entire discussion more focused, accurate, meaningful, significant, and complete.
Dreams make sensory experience in general more like thought and flatten vision in accordance with inertial and gravitational equivalency.
I have proven, in detail and with specifics -- as the following makes clear -- how television is an extended and unnatural form of dream vision as waking vision.
Television functions as an emotional "painkiller" and, accordingly, as an emotional euphoric.
Indeed, television has been aptly described as being the "plug-in drug."
The overeating during television occurs in keeping with the fact that TV is an extended, interactive, and unnatural form of dream vision AS waking vision. Bodily feeling/sensation is therefore reduced during TV
(as is the case during dream experience), so the feeling of fullness is reduced/lacking. Dr. Joyce Starr agrees with this as well. (Television is an unnatural creation of generalized thought; accordingly, TV may be held to be a generalized hallucination.) The
experience of sound and vision in/as TV is even more like thought than in the case of the vision and sound in the dream.
Emotion is manifest as sensory experience and feeling.
TV involves emotional detachment, disintegration, contraction, and loss; and this certainly relates to (or involves) depression and anxiety as well. Importantly, TV also reduces memory and thought; and
this is also consistent with/similar to dream experience. Hence, the overeating while watching television relates to the reduction in thought and memory as well.
I have much more written about the specifics of [exactly] how and why TV is an extended and unnatural form of dream vision as waking vision; but the important lesson here is that the reconfiguration, reduction, and/or replacement of sensory experience (in all forms -- including photographs, TV, etc., etc.) is definitely having a much more profound and interactive effect than is recognized.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe range and extensiveness of feeling has also been significantly altered. Thoughts and emotions are differentiated feelings.
Dreams are so "smart" of an experience that we are, in effect, "outsmarted" therein.
Let's not make experience a further creation of thought to the point that we become more inanimate. Sad to say, this is already happening.