Thinking about the beloved reduces the feeling of pain

Some people, based on popular beliefs, claim that love involves suffering but ... psychologists at UCLA say that this idea is not entirely true.

The study involved 25 women, most of them students from the university itself. An essential criterion to be part of the experiment was to have a satisfactory and stable couple of at least six months duration.

The girls were subjected to moderately painful stimuli on their forearms while the conditions of the medium varied. This variation consisted in showing him different photographs: images of a perfect stranger, a chair and his boyfriends.

When the women observed the image of their partners they reported feeling less pain than when they presented the rest of the photographs.

Subsequently the images were removed and maintaining the painful stimulus allowed the girls to hold a rubber ball, squeeze the hand of a stranger or the hand of their partner. Of course, the results were identical, holding the hand of the beloved diminished his perception of pain.

These discrete research results show the important role that social support networks play in coping with pain and stressful situations, but at the same time they could radically turn all previous psychological notions about the role of social support networks.

So far, Psychology recognizes that social support networks act by providing guidance from the cognitive point of view, providing emotional and material support as well as acting as social regulators. In short, a person with a strong social support network will experience more self-confidence, self-confidence and express more positive feelings, achieving an approach to their environment from more flexible perspectives; However, the results of this research could go further because the strong emotional ties that are established with some people could cause changes at the biochemical level, a true reason why people who have a support network are more immune to diseases and recover more quickly from them.

At the moment they are only speculations but without a doubt, it is an idea that will continue to be enriched with new experimental data in the not too distant future.