Psychological Science:摸钱能缓和被人拒绝带来的痛苦

[moomoofarm]

这个研究非常地搞怪，而且最好玩的是它是中国人参与做的，中山大学的教授。

被人拒绝是一项非常痛苦的事情，心理学脑成像研究确实发现社会拒绝对大脑所造成的影响是与真正的痛觉（比如被针扎）一样。

但是怎么解决呢？

对的，让被拒绝的人融入社会群体，所谓的social acceptance。这篇研究就为我们提供了一个额外的选择，钱能作为它的替代吗？自然报道的
文章也有意把人民币的图片放在文章里面，下面问道“a substitute of social acceptance”（社会接受的替代品？）

source

Handling or even contemplating money can relieve both physical pain
and the distress of social rejection, according to a study by Chinese
and American psychologists1. But remembering cash one has spent
intensifies both types of hurt.

The findings suggest that the mere thought of having money makes
people feel physically stronger and less dependent on the approval of
others to satisfy their needs. "Money activates a general sense of
confidence, strength, and efficacy," the researchers propose.

The study backs up previous experiments2 in which experimental
subjects who had been subconsciously primed with thoughts of money
were less likely to ask for help on difficult tasks.

"Previous work hadn't gone as far as to link reminders of money to
something at a physical perceptual level," explains Kathleen Vohs of
the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, who was involved in both
past research and the present study, which was published in
Psychological Science1.
Easing the pain

Psychologist Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou ran
half a dozen experiments with groups of between 72 and 108 students,
to test how subconscious thoughts of gaining or losing money affected
their resistance to both the pain of social rejection and the pain of
immersing their fingers in hot water.

Students played a computer game called Cyberball, in which players
think they are playing catch with three other individuals. These are
actually being controlled by the computer, which eventually refuses to
throw the ball to the human player. The game is normally used by
psychologists to provoke feelings of exclusion. The students who had
physically handled money before playing, thinking they were completing
a finger-dexterity task, reported feeling less distress on a standard
social self-esteem scale than those who had handled blank pieces of
paper.

In another experiment, students who counted money before plunging
their fingers into hot water reported lower pain levels than those who
had counted paper. The money-handling students also reported feeling
stronger than the paper shufflers did.

The researchers asked some students to write down their recent
expenses before playing Cyberball, while others simply wrote about the
weather. Those who had written about their expenses reported feeling
greater distress when they were excluded from the virtual game.

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That social exclusion and physical pain yielded parallel reactions
supports an emerging idea in psychology, that some of the brain's
tools for processing social interaction evolved by adapting pre-
existing systems that dealt with physical pain, the researchers add.

"We know that social exclusion has all sorts of negative consequences
for behaviour," says psychologist Nathan DeWall of the University of
Kentucky in Lexington. So it might be worth exploring in a future
study whether thinking about money could "reduce the effect of
exclusion on aggression", he says.

Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at Duke University in Durham,
North Carolina, suggests that money is also a way for people to regain
a feeling of control. "It would have been great to test how this
sentiment changed over time," as the economy slipped into recession,
he says. Such a study might reveal a fluctuating exchange rate between
money's soothing value and the links to social behaviour.


References
1. Zhou, X., Vohs, K. D., & Baumeister, R. F. Psychological Science
doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02353.x (2009).
2. Vohs, K. D., Mead, N. L., & Goode, M. R. Science 314, 1154-1156
2006.