Social Psychology
Psych in Real Life: Love and Pain
Learning Objectives
- Examine the relationship between romantic ties and the experience of pain or pleasure
Relationships and Health
One of the greatest medicines in the world doesn’t come in pill form and it can’t be injected with a syringe. No surgery is required. It is other people.
An impressive amount of research from psychology and medicine supports the claim that having a strong social support network— supportive friends and family—is associated with maintaining both physical and psychological health and recovering quickly and effectively from physical and psychological problems. Loneliness and isolation are risk-factors to leading a healthy, happy life.
The goal of scientific psychology is to understand the deep underlying causes of psychological and behavioral factors. Evidence that there is an association between health and social support is the beginning—not the end—of scientific investigation. We want to know why such a relationship exists. This curiosity is not simply an academic exercise. Treatments can only be improved and targeted to specific needs if we understand how they work.
Correlations can identify interesting relationships (e.g., there is a positive correlation between a person’s amount of social support and success in recovering from physical and psychological problems), but they usually cannot provide strong evidence for why that relationship exists. That is the job of experiments.
When you design an experiment, you must often create a very specific situation to test and explore your ideas. We have been talking in grand terms about “social support networks” and “mental and physical health,” but individual experiments typically cannot work on such a broad scale. Instead, the experimenter tries to find a single simple type of social support that can be manipulated in the laboratory and a single simple element of health that can be measured and studied in the laboratory. One disadvantage of this sharp focus on a specific situation in experiments is that a single experiment—even a single set of related experiments—is unlikely to fully identify the causes we are looking for. Experimental evidence typically accumulates slowly, over long periods of time, filled with apparent contradictions that can take time and effort to sort out.
We are going to look at two experiments from different research teams that take a similar approach to trying to understand if social contact influences a health-related experience—in this case, pain—and how such an influence might work (i.e., what might be the causal mechanisms?).
Experiment 1: Love and Pain
Sarah L. Master and her colleagues[1] conducted a simple experiment that they published in 2009. Their subjects were healthy college students who volunteered to participate in an experiment that tested the idea that contact with a romantic partner can reduce our experience of pain.
Participants
Master and her colleagues recruited heterosexual co