When John McCain gave his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, he spoke at length about his imprisonment in Vietnam, and his harrowing ordeal. What was fascinating about this speech was that he maintained a relatively calm tone, even though he was describing events in which he was beaten and physically broken. This calm tone contrasts with McCain's reaction when he is reminded of the vile attack ads that were used against him when he ran against George W. Bush in the primaries. In those discussions, McCain can get visibly angry.

You might think that McCain is suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress disorder that affects his ability to remember and recall his time as a POW, but a paper in the August, 2008 issue of Psychological Science suggests a different explanation.

Zhansheng Chen, Kipling Williams, Julie Fitness, and Nicola Newton did a clever set of studies contrasting people's ability to relive physical and social pain. They asked people to describe physically painful past experiences (like getting a root canal, or breaking a bone) and socially painful experiences (like being betrayed by a loved one). The experiences were all judged to be equally painful at the time that they occurred. So, the pain of the root canal or broken bone was just as bad as the pain of the betrayal. When people redescribed the physical pain situation, they did not re-experience the pain. But, when they redescribed the social pain, they did re-experience it. That is, they felt pain again when thinking again about a past socially painful experience.

One nice thing about this set of studies was that the researchers used both self-report and also demonstrations of cognitive deficits caused by the pain. It is well-known that people have trouble thinking when they're in pain. Just try to concentrate with a headache or after an injury. In two of the studies, people were asked to do hard cognitive tasks after recalling physically or socially painful situations. The people who recalled the physically painful situations did much better on the cognitive tasks than the ones who recalled socially painful situations, suggesting that the social pain being experienced was real pain. People were not simply calling the memory for the social event painful. They seemed to be experiencing the pain again.

This result meshes with the observation that the pain of a betrayal or the pain of being neglected by your parents can stay with you throughout your life. Future research is going to have to look at why social pain is so easy to re-experience in order to create ways to dampen that pain over time.