People Madly In Love Feel Less Painstudy

People Madly In Love Feel Less Painstudy

By:


Researchers delving into the role of love in regulating pain found that viewing the picture of a loved one triggers the release of the bodys own pain killer.

Lead author of the study, Dr. Sean Mackey, chief of the pain management division at the Stanford University School of Medicine stated, These pain relieving systems are linked to reward systems.

Love engages these deep brain systems that are involved with reward and craving and similar systems involved in addiction. This gives us some insight into potential ways of further probing and ultimately translating that into treatment of pain.

Interaction between love and pain examined
In order to get an insight into the interaction between love and pain, the researchers conducted a study.

They recruited 15 young volunteers who were head over heels in love for a brain-imaging study.

All the participants were asked to bring along a picture of their beloved and another of fairy attractive acquaintance.

As a part of the study, the researchers inflicted pain on the palms of the young lovers left hand using a hot thermal probe. The dose of pain was gradually increased until it became intolerable.

The participants were asked to rate the degree of pain on a scale of zero to 10, with zero indicating "no pain at all" and 10 being "the worst pain imaginable".

In the next phase of the experiment, the researchers stimulated pain levels of zero, four,, and seven on the subjects while pictures of either the beloved or the acquaintance were flashed before the participants in succession.

Simultaneously, the students had their brains scanned to measure how much pain they felt.

It was noted that students who gazed at a picture of his or her beloved while being poked with the heated probe felt less pain.

In fact, youngsters who spent more than half of the day thinking of their loved one experienced three times more pain relief than the other participants.

Distraction also dulls pain
In another experiment, the study subjects were asked to engage in mental word association games while the investigators measured their response to pain when they were distracted.

Distractions have previously been known to alleviate pain.

It was noted that although both love and mental distractions had the power to lower the perception of pain by the same amount they both used completely different regions of the brain to lessen pain.

Mackey said, To our pleasant surprise, both love and distraction reduce pain to an equal amount and that was good because it more fully allowed us to compare them.

He added, The brain systems involved in distraction are entirely different from those involved in love. In distraction, there was a much higher level of the newer corticol systems involved with classic attention and distraction.

The findings were published in the Public Library of Science journal 'PLoS One'.

About the Author:
For more information check out
Quitting smoking enhances moodstudy



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: , ,

|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent Health Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.