How do you explain heartbreak?

March 31, 2005 10:47 AM

What is the psychology/biology/(insert)-ology behind what we commonly refer to as "heartbreak?"
posted by playtragic to Grab Bag (11 answers total)

off the top of my head I think it would be a combination of factors, including unmet expectations, realization of rejection at some level (failure figures in here). Sometimes, overdependence on the other individual.
Such issues act as system depressants, I don't know about the precise biology, but thinking of heartbreak and other situations where one feels like a failure it seems a similar physical feeling.
posted by edgeways at 11:20 AM on March 31, 2005

My best guess is that experiencing or thinking about emotionally stressful things is stimulating your sympathetic nervous system, which will increase your heart and respiratory rates, which can feel like constriction in your heart area. Depression and anxiety can also cause this, and I don't think they're dissimilar, although depression can go the other way as well.
posted by LittleMissCranky at 11:26 AM on March 31, 2005

this economist article goes into the neurochemistry of love.
posted by andrew cooke at 11:27 AM on March 31, 2005

Comments so far have discussed how; what about why?

Steven Pinker discusses evolutionary explanations for human emotions from the point of view of evolutionary psychology in How the Mind Works. Pinker describes grief as a deterrent: if you know that losing someone will be extremely painful, you'll do whatever you can to try to keep it from happening.
posted by russilwvong at 11:32 AM on March 31, 2005

Some papers at the 'Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab' at UCLA - probably try Why rejection hurts: a comon neural alarm system for physical and social pain or Broken hearts and broken bones: The neurocognitive overlap between social pain and physical pain (both are PDF - may have to do a "Save As")

"Social pain" looks like it would be the appropriate keyword, if searching journals.
posted by milkrate at 11:43 AM on March 31, 2005

on the why, the tangled wing has a long discussion (it may also include details about how - unfortunately my copy is in la serena and i'm now at home).
posted by andrew cooke at 11:47 AM on March 31, 2005

I smell a great FPP in these answers, if playtragic would be kind enough to compile it.
posted by orthogonality at 2:53 PM on March 31, 2005

It's worth noting that hunter-gatherers are rarely alone. Anthropologists saying they're going to go over there (20 meters away, for example) to go to the bathroom have been met with comments like "by yourself? why would you want to do anything so dangerous?" Americans are individualistic, but generally people function constantly as components of larger systems. Studies of divorcees have found that the individuals had "outsourced" certain cognitive tasks to their partners and had trouble re-learning them on their own.
posted by Tlogmer at 3:42 PM on March 31, 2005

Tlogmer writes "Studies of divorcees have found that the individuals had 'outsourced' certain cognitive tasks to their partners and had trouble re-learning them on their own."

Cite please?
posted by orthogonality at 3:44 PM on March 31, 2005

orthogonality: anecdotal support for the outsourcing, and difficulty. In my case, it was grief that made the difficulty, my first partner died quite unexpectedly (heart disease).
posted by Goofyy at 11:15 PM on March 31, 2005

The best psychological explanation I have seen is that heartbreak is an obsessive reaction to or displacement of reawakened childhood abandonment fears, for example when an infant wakes up alone and imagines itself deserted by its parents. Personally I found zen meditation an effective, if slow-working antidote, which I should think would prove helpful for other kinds of obsessive complaints as well.
posted by plainfeather at 6:11 AM on April 1, 2005 [1 favorite]