|
Rejection
hurts
The Zee
Cine Awards ceremony in Dubai was a nightmare for both Amitabh
Bachchan and Amar Singh. They were told told to sit right in the
middle of the crowd, with no special security arrangements. On the
record Amitabh was cool, but surely he felt hurt. Amar Singh, on the
other hand, was furious. When Amitabh came on the stage to receive
his Life Time Achievement Award he looked normal. But recent
scientific studies suggest that much more was going on in his
agitated mind.
The hurt a person feels when snubbed is much more
than a literary metaphor. Famous psychiatrist Dr George Engel
collected 275 newspaper accounts of sudden deaths. He discovered
that 21 of these had been caused by “loss of status, humiliation,
failure or defeat”. Psychologists believe that the pain of being
snubbed may have evolved because of the importance of social bonds
for survival and progress. A research study conducted at the
University of California (and published in the October issue of
Science) suggests that being snubbed can “hurt” the same way as
breaking a leg.
Naomi Eisenberger, then a PhD candidate in
social psychology and the study’s lead researcher, used functional
magentic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 13
undergraduate volunteers playing a cyberball game. In the game three
animated characters threw a ball at one another and created three
different social settings. The middle character in the game was
controlled by the participants, while the two other characters were
computer-controlled.
In the first setting, the participants were
told that they couldn’t take part in the game because of technical
problems. So they watched the other two animated players throw the
virtual ball at one another. This setting was designed to mimic
“implicit social exclusion” in which one person is left out for
reasons beyond his or her control. The second setting was a fair
game in which all three animated characters participated and threw
the ball at one another.
In the third setting, after a few rounds
of fair play the two animated characters began to ignore the third
player. For the next 45 throws, the participants didn’t get the ball
to throw. Like Amar Singh, the participants considered this
situation as “explicit social exclusion.”
The brain scans of the
participants showed that both settings – implicit and explicit
social exclusion — triggered some kind of activity in the anterior
cingulate cortex (ACC). The anterior cingulate cortex, located in
the centre of the brain, is known to be involved in sensing and
processing physical pain. It alarms higher brain regions that drives
the victim to act in order to stop the pain. When the participants
felt they were being deliberately slighted, the right ventral
prefrontal cortex was also activated. The right ventral prefrontal
cortex is located behind the forehead and eyes. It is associated
with pain, thinking with emotions and with self-control.
The
researchers also discovered an interesting point: The volunteers who
had most activity in the prefrontal cortex had the least amount of
activity in the cingulate. Between the anterior cingulate cortex and
prefrontal cortex, scientists do not fully know who is in control.
But activation of the prefrontal cortex appears to help dampen the
distress of both physical pain and social exclusion.
In an
another study on isolation and rejection, social psychologist Roy F.
Baumeister and his colleagues asked their subjects to take a variety
of intelligence tests. Subjects were again asked to take the tests
after some unpleasant experiences. Some subjects were given a
personality evaluation that misled them to believe that they were
destined to spend their lives alone. Other subjects were introduced
with a group of strangers who, they were told, would be available to
help them complete the task at hand. But later subjects were told
that none of the strangers wished to work with them.
Rejection
really hurts. The performance of subjects decreased significantly as
a result of their negative experiences; their IQ scores dropped by
some 25 per cent and their analytical reasoning by about 30 per
cent. “Connecting with others is one of the deepest and most
powerful human drives, and thwarting it has a big impact,” concluded
Baumeister in his two-year long study. According to Baumeister, one
may not think straight for a while after being rejected. Amar Singh
really lost his mind as he started blasting event organisers on the
spot. Verbalising distress may partially shut down areas of the
brain that register emotional pain. In a sense, by expressing his
feelings Amar Singh may have done the greatest favour to himself.
While his memories about this much publicised episode are most
likely to fade away eventually, Amitabh will most probably never be
able to forget this incident.
(A former project coordinator
with the National Council of Science Museums, India and exhibits
manager at the Discovery Centre, Halifax, Raj Kaushik now works as
senior server developer in Toronto.)
|
