9/9 Special thanks to Kay Tye for providing me the opportunity to carry out this intersectional project and for the rest of the fearless team that helped every step of the way! t.co/74WdLC0LrN

8\neural strategies that are employed within emotional pain processing systems within the brain and paves the way for targeted interventions aimed at alleviating the distress associated with social disconnection and pain dysregulation.

7\Collectively, our work provides the framework for a novel paradigm to induce Social Exclusion and the first evidence for a specific neural mechanism for the overlap between Social Exclusion and physical pain. Furthermore, this advances our general understanding of

6\We also found that intra-insular blockade of oxytocin signaling increased the impact of Social Exclusion on physical pain. Together these findings suggest Social Exclusion effectively alters physical pain perception using neuromodulatory signaling in the insular cortex.

5\We performed a systematic biosensor panel and found that endocannabinoid and oxytocin signaling in the insular cortex have opposing responses during distinct phases of Social Exclusion.

4\We found that socially-excluded mice display more severe responses to physical pain, disrupted valence encoding, and impaired neural representations of nociceptive stimuli.

3\To determine whether social pain can subsequently impact responses to nociceptive stimuli via convergent electrical signals (spikes) or convergent chemical signals (neuromodulators), we designed a novel Social Exclusion paradigm termed the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) Task.

2\ that can serve to maintain an individual’s social homeostasis. The “Pain Overlap Theory” proposes that the experience of social pain overlaps with and amplifies the experience of physical pain by sharing parts of the same underlying processing systems.

🧵 1\New Preprint! Social pain, the emotional pain caused by aversive experiences with other individuals, is an umbrella term that includes experiences such as social isolation, social exclusion, social rejection, and social loss and can be used as a signal to drive a need state