Washington ? A rejected lover’s broken heart may cause as much distress in a pain center of the brain as an actual physical injury, according to new research.

California researchers have found a physiological basis for social pain by monitoring the brains of people who thought they had been maliciously excluded from a computer game by other players.

Naomi I. Eisenberger, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the first author of the study to be published today in the journal Science, said the study suggested that the need for social inclusiveness was a deep-seated part of what it means to be human.

“These findings show how deeply rooted our need is for social connection,” Eisenberger said. “There’s something about exclusion from others that is perceived as being as harmful to our survival as something that can physically hurt us, and our body automatically knows this.”

Eisenberger and her co-authors created a computer game in which test subjects were led to believe they were playing ball with two other players. At some point, the other players seemed to exclude the test subject from the game — making it appear the test subject had been suddenly rejected and blocked from playing with the group.

The shock and distress of this rejection registered in the same part of the brain, called the anterior cingulate cortex, that also responds to physical pain, Eisenberger said.

“The ACC is the same part of the brain that has been found to be associated with the unpleasantness of physical pain, the part of pain that really bothers us,” Eisenberger said.

Eisenberger said the study suggested that social exclusion of any sort — divorce, not being invited to a party, being turned down for a date — would cause distress.

“You can imagine that this part of the brain is active any time we are separated from our close companions,” she said. “It would definitely be active when we experience a loss.”