Eisenberger, N., Lieberman, M., & Williams, K. (2003) | References

What This Research Found

In 2003, Naomi Eisenberger, Matthew Lieberman, and Kipling Williams published a study that fundamentally changed how science understands social pain. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they demonstrated that the brain processes social rejection using the same neural circuitry it uses for physical pain—establishing that the experience of being excluded, rejected, or abandoned is not merely metaphorically painful but literally activates the brain's pain systems.

The Cyberball paradigm created controlled social exclusion. The researchers developed an elegant experimental design using a virtual ball-tossing game. Participants believed they were playing with two other people online, throwing a ball back and forth. In reality, the other "players" were computer-controlled. During the exclusion condition, participants were gradually frozen out of the game—the other players stopped throwing the ball to them, leaving them watching helplessly as the game continued without them. This simple manipulation reliably produced feelings of distress, hurt, and rejection. The paradigm has since become one of the most widely used methods in social psychology, replicated hundreds of times across cultures and contexts.

Social exclusion activated pain-related brain regions. The critical finding emerged from the brain scans. When participants were excluded from the ball-tossing game, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) showed significantly increased activation. This region is well-established in pain research as processing the affective, distressing component of physical pain—the part that makes pain feel bad, as distinct from the sensory detection of where the injury occurred. The anterior insula, another region involved in processing aversive experiences and interoceptive awareness, also showed increased activation during exclusion. Crucially, the degree of dACC activation correlated with participants' self-reported distress: the more neural activity, the more hurt they felt.

The brain treats social threats as survival threats. This overlap between social and physical pain circuitry has a clear evolutionary logic. For our ancestors, group belonging was essential for survival. Isolation from the group meant death—from predators, starvation, or exposure. The brain evolved to treat threats to social connection with the same urgency as threats to physical integrity because, in our evolutionary past, they were equally dangerous. The pain of rejection motivates social behaviours that maintain group bonds: seeking reconciliation, avoiding exclusion-provoking actions, and attending carefully to social cues. What modern humans experience as excessive sensitivity to rejection is an ancient alarm system calibrated for a world where rejection meant death.

Subsequent research extended and confirmed these findings. The 2003 study launched a research programme that has produced hundreds of follow-up studies. Researchers have shown that social rejection increases cortisol and other stress hormones, affects immune function, and even responds to physical painkillers—taking acetaminophen reduces both self-reported hurt feelings and neural activation during rejection. Different forms of social pain—romantic rejection, bereavement, and ostracism—activate overlapping but somewhat distinct patterns. Individual differences in rejection sensitivity can be traced to both genetic factors (particularly opioid and serotonin receptor genes) and early experiences (especially attachment history). The basic finding has proven robust: social rejection really does hurt.

How This Research Is Used in the Book

Eisenberger's research appears in Narcissus and the Child as foundational evidence for understanding why narcissistic abuse causes such profound suffering. In Chapter 3, the book explains why abandonment fears trigger extreme behavioural responses:

"Social rejection actually registers as physical pain. Abandonment fears trigger such extreme behavioural responses because the person is responding to genuine agony."

This citation establishes that the terror of abandonment experienced by those with insecure attachment is not an overreaction but a neurologically grounded response. The brain's pain circuitry does not distinguish between physical injury and social exclusion; both activate overlapping alarm systems. For children raised by narcissistic parents—who often use withdrawal of love as a primary control mechanism—this creates a developmental environment of chronic pain.

The research also illuminates a paradox at the heart of narcissistic pathology. In Chapter 6, the book describes how narcissists process rejection differently than their victims:

"The narcissistic brain shows hyperactivation to anticipated rejection but paradoxically numbs itself to actual rejection."

This observation captures a critical asymmetry. Narcissists are not actually insensitive to rejection—indeed, their grandiose defences exist precisely because they are hypersensitive to the threat of rejection. However, they deploy defensive mechanisms (denial, devaluation, rage, immediate pursuit of alternative supply) that prevent the conscious experience of rejection pain. Their victims, by contrast, have often developed hypervigilance to rejection cues as a survival adaptation and cannot deploy these defensive mechanisms. The narcissist feels rejection at a preconscious neural level but defends against experiencing it; the victim feels it at every level without protection.

Throughout the book, this research supports the central argument that narcissistic abuse is not "just" emotional abuse—it involves repeated activation of the brain's pain circuitry, creating lasting neurological changes that help explain why survivors struggle long after the abuse has ended.

Why This Matters for Survivors

If you have experienced narcissistic abuse, Eisenberger's research validates something you have known in your body: the pain is real. Not metaphorical, not exaggerated, not a sign of weakness—but genuine activation of the same neural systems that would fire if you were physically injured. Understanding this changes how you can think about your experiences and your healing.

Your pain response is neurologically appropriate, not an overreaction. When a narcissist discards you, gives you the silent treatment, withholds affection, or devalues you after idealisation, your brain registers these as threats to survival. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex activates; distress signals propagate through the nervous system; stress hormones surge. You are not being "too sensitive" or "making a big deal out of nothing." You are experiencing the predictable neurological response to social rejection—a response that evolved because our ancestors needed to treat exclusion as an emergency. The people who tell you to "just get over it" do not understand that social pain shares circuitry with physical pain. You would not tell someone with a broken leg to just stop hurting.

Chronic narcissistic abuse creates chronic pain. A single rejection event activates pain circuitry briefly; the system recovers. But narcissistic abuse involves repeated, often unpredictable rejection experiences over months, years, or decades. Each silent treatment, each devaluing comment, each emotional abandonment activates your pain systems again. This chronic activation creates sensitisation—the circuits become more easily triggered, respond more intensely, and take longer to calm. Your current hypervigilance to rejection, your intense fear of abandonment, your quick pain responses to perceived slights are not personality flaws. They are the predictable result of a pain system that was activated so many times it became chronically hypersensitive. Understanding this is the first step toward healing.

The silent treatment is neurological assault. Narcissists commonly use withdrawal of communication and attention as a control tactic. This research explains why it is so devastatingly effective: the silent treatment directly activates pain circuitry. You are not being punished with absence; you are being hurt with exclusion. The narcissist does not need to raise a hand to cause neurological pain. The unpredictability of when the silent treatment will end keeps your stress response activated; the relief when it finally ends creates powerful intermittent reinforcement that strengthens the trauma bond. Recognising this pattern as a form of pain delivery, not just "needing space," can help you understand why leaving feels so hard and why healing takes so long.

Healing runs through the same neural systems. If rejection pain is processed through specific brain circuits, then healing involves recalibrating those circuits. This happens not through willpower or insight alone, but through repeated experiences of social acceptance and secure connection. Therapy with an attuned clinician, safe friendships, community belonging, and eventually healthy romantic attachment can all provide the corrective experiences that teach your sensitised pain circuits that social safety is possible. The path out of pain runs through the same neural architecture that was shaped by the abuse—but now in the direction of healing rather than harm. Neuroplasticity works in both directions.

Clinical Implications

For psychiatrists, psychologists, and trauma-informed healthcare providers, Eisenberger's research has direct implications for understanding and treating survivors of narcissistic and relational abuse.

Validate the severity of social pain. When a patient presents as devastated by rejection, abandonment, or relational trauma, they are not being histrionic or overreacting. Their brain is registering genuine pain through the same circuitry that processes physical injury. Clinicians should explicitly validate this: "What you're describing causes real pain in the brain—the same regions that process physical pain." This validation is itself therapeutic, reducing the secondary suffering that comes from feeling one's reactions are excessive or irrational.

Assess for chronic rejection exposure. Intake assessments should include inquiry about patterns of social exclusion, silent treatment, and emotional abandonment. A single traumatic event is different from years of unpredictable rejection cycling. Chronic exposure sensitises pain circuitry, creating a presentation that may look like generalised anxiety or interpersonal hypersensitivity but actually reflects trauma-induced neural changes. The question is not just "what happened?" but "how often, for how long, and how unpredictably?"

Consider the somatic dimension of social pain. Because rejection activates circuits that process both emotional and physical components of pain, body-based interventions may be particularly relevant. Somatic experiencing, sensorimotor psychotherapy, and other approaches that work with the body's pain and stress responses may reach injury that purely cognitive approaches miss. The patient who cannot "think their way out" of rejection sensitivity may need interventions that address the subcortical, embodied aspects of social pain.

The therapeutic relationship as corrective experience. The therapist provides a relationship characterised by consistent acceptance without rejection. Over time, this can help recalibrate pain-sensitised circuits. Rupture and repair within therapy—the therapist's reliable return after misattunements—teaches that relationships can survive conflict without abandonment. This is not just creating a warm atmosphere for other techniques; the relationship itself is the mechanism of change for patients whose core injury involves chronic rejection.

Pharmacological considerations emerge from this research. Studies following Eisenberger's work have shown that social pain responds to physical painkillers—acetaminophen reduces both self-reported hurt and neural activation during rejection. While no one is suggesting acetaminophen as a primary treatment for rejection sensitivity, the finding opens questions about pharmacological approaches that might affect pain-processing systems. Medications affecting opioid, serotonin, or other neurotransmitter systems involved in pain modulation may have roles in treating severe rejection sensitivity, though research in this area remains preliminary.

Psychoeducation empowers patients. Teaching patients about the neuroscience of social pain can be therapeutic. It reframes their reactions from personal failing to biological response, reduces shame, and provides a framework for understanding why healing takes time. "Your brain processes rejection like physical injury because, evolutionarily, social exclusion was as dangerous as predators. Your pain circuitry was activated repeatedly for years. Recalibrating those circuits takes time and corrective experience. This isn't weakness—it's neurobiology."

Broader Implications

Eisenberger's discovery that social pain shares neural circuitry with physical pain has implications extending far beyond the therapy room into families, organisations, and society at large.

Understanding Narcissistic Abuse as Neurological Injury

Narcissistic abuse often leaves no visible marks, leading society and even victims themselves to minimise its severity. Eisenberger's research reframes this: narcissistic abuse involves repeated activation of pain circuitry. The silent treatment, the devaluation, the unpredictable withdrawal of affection—these are not merely psychological tactics but neurological assaults that cause measurable changes in brain function. Courts, custody evaluators, and society at large should understand that "just" emotional abuse causes genuine, neurologically grounded injury. The absence of bruises does not mean the absence of harm.

The Weaponisation of Social Pain

Understanding that exclusion causes pain illuminates how this pain can be deliberately weaponised. Ostracism, silent treatment, and social exclusion are not merely passive withdrawal but active infliction of suffering. Narcissists, bullies, and abusers intuitively understand this—they use rejection strategically to control behaviour. Schools, workplaces, and families should recognise exclusion as a form of harm requiring intervention, not just a social preference. "I just don't want to include them" may be a sentence describing the delivery of pain.

Why Social Media Rejection Hurts

The neural circuitry that evolved for face-to-face rejection also activates in response to online exclusion—being unfriended, ignored, or attacked on social media. This helps explain the documented mental health effects of social media, particularly among adolescents whose rejection-detection systems are still developing. The scale and permanence of online rejection may be evolutionarily unprecedented: humans never before had to cope with rejection from thousands of people simultaneously, archived permanently. Understanding social media through the lens of pain neuroscience suggests the need for design and policy interventions that reduce online social harm.

Implications for Child Development

Children are exquisitely sensitive to social pain. The developing brain calibrates its rejection-detection systems based on early experiences. Children raised in environments of chronic rejection—including by narcissistic parents who use love withdrawal as discipline—develop hypersensitive pain circuitry that persists into adulthood. This has implications for parenting practices: discipline that relies on love withdrawal, silent treatment, or emotional abandonment causes neurological injury to the developing brain. Time-outs that feel like rejection may do more harm than intended. Parenting education should incorporate understanding of how children experience social pain.

Workplace and Organisational Dynamics

Workplace exclusion—being left out of meetings, not acknowledged by colleagues, ignored by supervisors—activates pain circuitry just as social exclusion does elsewhere. Employees who report feeling excluded are not being oversensitive; they are experiencing genuine neural distress. Organisations should recognise exclusion as a workplace hazard comparable to other stressors, with implications for team dynamics, management practices, and responses to workplace bullying. The narcissistic boss who uses strategic exclusion is causing measurable harm to employee brains.

The Intergenerational Transmission of Rejection Sensitivity

Parents whose own rejection-detection circuits are hypersensitised by their histories may struggle to provide the consistent acceptance their children need. They may perceive rejection in their children's normal bids for autonomy, react defensively, and inadvertently create rejecting environments for their children. This is one mechanism by which intergenerational trauma transmits: the parent's sensitised pain circuitry leads to parenting behaviours that sensitise the child's circuitry in turn. Breaking this cycle requires helping parents heal their own rejection injuries so they can provide the consistent acceptance that calibrates healthy social-pain systems in their children.

Limitations and Considerations

While Eisenberger's research has been enormously influential and widely replicated, responsible interpretation requires attention to limitations.

Overlap does not mean identity. Social and physical pain share neural substrates, but they are not identical. Later research has refined the picture: some brain regions respond more to social than physical pain and vice versa. The original claim of "same regions" has evolved into "overlapping but distinct networks." The fundamental insight—that social pain is neurologically real and shares circuitry with physical pain—remains valid, but the brain's pain systems are more complex than a single-study finding can capture.

Individual differences are substantial. Not everyone responds to exclusion with the same neural activation or subjective distress. Genetic factors, attachment history, current relationship context, and the meaning attributed to exclusion all influence responses. Clinicians should not assume that all rejection experiences produce equivalent neural and psychological effects. Some people are genuinely more resilient to rejection; others are more sensitive. Understanding the neuroscience should not erase attention to individual variation.

Laboratory versus real-world exclusion. Being excluded from a ball-tossing game by strangers in a research study is different from being discarded by a narcissistic partner after years of relationship. The Cyberball paradigm has excellent experimental control but limited ecological validity. Real-world rejection involves relationship history, betrayal, shattered expectations, and complex meaning-making that brief experimental exclusion cannot capture. The research provides a foundation, but clinical work must engage with the full complexity of lived rejection experiences.

Translation to treatment is ongoing. Knowing that rejection activates pain circuitry does not immediately tell us how to heal that circuitry. The finding that acetaminophen reduces social pain is intriguing but far from a treatment protocol. Clinicians should be informed by this research but not make premature leaps to interventions. The field is still developing evidence-based approaches specifically targeting social pain systems.

Cultural considerations apply. Most research in this area has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialised, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations. How social pain is experienced, expressed, and processed may vary across cultures with different social structures and meanings of inclusion and exclusion. Clinicians working with diverse populations should be alert to cultural variation in how rejection is understood and experienced.

Historical Context

Eisenberger, Lieberman, and Williams published their findings in Science in October 2003, at a pivotal moment in the development of social neuroscience. Brain imaging technology had matured to the point where researchers could investigate the neural basis of complex social and emotional experiences. But the field was still establishing itself against the dominance of cognitive neuroscience, which focused on "cold" mental processes like memory, attention, and reasoning.

The publication of this study in Science—one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals—signalled that the neuroscience of social experience had arrived as serious science. The finding was memorable and media-friendly: rejection literally hurts, in the brain. It captured public attention in ways that most neuroscience research does not. The study has since been cited over 5,000 times and has influenced fields from psychology to sociology to organisational behaviour.

The research built on earlier work by Jaak Panksepp and others showing that social attachment operates through the endogenous opioid system and that separation distress involves genuine neurochemistry. Eisenberger's innovation was to demonstrate, using state-of-the-art imaging, exactly which brain regions activated during social exclusion—and to show that these were pain-related regions. The study also built on Kipling Williams's two decades of research on ostracism, for which he had developed the Cyberball paradigm as an elegant way to create controlled social exclusion in the laboratory.

Following the 2003 publication, Eisenberger and collaborators pursued an extensive research programme examining social pain from multiple angles. They showed that social rejection increases cortisol, that individual differences in rejection sensitivity relate to genetic variations in opioid and serotonin systems, that the brain regions responding to rejection overlap with those responding to bereavement, and that social support can buffer pain responses both social and physical. The basic finding has proven remarkably robust across replications, populations, and variations on the paradigm.

Today, the understanding that social and physical pain share neural circuitry is foundational knowledge in social neuroscience. It has influenced clinical approaches to complex PTSD and relational trauma, informed design of interventions for social anxiety and rejection sensitivity, and shaped public understanding of why social relationships matter so much for health and well-being.

Does rejection hurt? An fMRI study of social exclusion

APA Citation