Seats and forms of power : To what extent can we say that the social rejection is a matter of psychology ?

Intro : I’m going to deal with the notion Seats and Forms of power. First of all, I would like to give you a definition. In politics and social science, power is the ability to influence the behavior of peoople. In order to live together, members of a community accept rules, laws… This helps to create social cohesion but can also lead to conflicts and tensions. Even when authority seams absolute, tree are always couter-pokers which question it, aim at limiting its excesses and resist it.

In the logic, we agree to say that the pain felt by a person confronted with the social rejection is at first of psychological order. The damage caused by a wound is, them, rather bound to the physical appearance.

To what extent can we say that the social rejection is a matter of psychology ?

What we also call ostracism can go to be voluntarily excluded from a group in that not to be chosen after a job interview, or still to be left by his / her partner.

These situations are numerous and painful.

The science dealt with for a long time the effects of the physical pains, by neglecting those due to the psychological domain.

"It's as if all the field of the search had missed this determining aspect of human life", declared Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neurosciences at the University Duke in the USA.

Fortunately, it changed during the last decade with an increasing number of researchers who were interested in this type of ill-being.

The ostracism can influence the emotion, the cognition and even the physical health.

It increases the anger, the anxiety, the depression, the jealousy, the sadness and also reduces the performances on difficult intellectual tasks. In strength, rejected people can sometimes become aggressive. In 2003, Leary and his colleagues analyzed 15 cases of young people involved in slaughters in their school, and found that 13 of them suffered from ostracism.

To study this process of ostracism, the scientists used a MRI to watch the intellectual activity of subjects during a simulation of social rejection. According to them, two zones of the brain associated with the physical pain react then.

In reality, the physical pain has two aspects : the sensory experience of the pain and its emotional aspect, in which your brain decides to what extent on the pain is painful.

This emotional component of the physical pain is similar to the pain felt during a social rejection.

Scientists subjected in particular pictures of their ex-partner to subjects having been left recently (we agree, it is cruel). They discovered that the brain handles the physical and mental pains almost in the same way, that is by freeing a kind of natural painkiller.

Among 122 participants in the experience, the scientists managed to isolate a gene bound to the pain.

Nevertheless, so unpleasant is this pain has a real utility. From the point of view of the evolution, to be socially isolated, without support, is synonymic of endangerment and potentially death. The Nature doubtless made so that the ostracism is unpleasant so that the individuals remain grouped and can more survive and evolve together.

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