This is an ABC podcast.

About a decade ago, psychologist Ethan Cross found himself doing something totally out of character.

I'm pacing my house with a baseball bat. At one point, I found myself contemplating just terribly irrational things.

You know, these bad guys coming to get us. And at one point in the early morning hours,

I actually, as embarrassing as it is to admit, contemplated doing a Google search for bodyguards

that specialize in protecting academics, which, you know, in

retrospect, right, is totally preposterous.

What in the world had gotten him to this point?

Well, the story starts out straightforward enough.

We just published a study showing that when people use the words of physical pain

to describe how they feel after being socially rejected, so people often say, oh, I'm in pain,

my feelings hurt. We published a study that suggested that when people are using that language

of being in pain, they may actually be referring to

physical sensations in their body. Ethan and his colleagues had found the brain processed emotional

and physical pain in surprisingly similar ways, more so than previously thought. And, you know,

we had no high expectations for this paper, but it ended up getting a lot of coverage.

I went on national television.

And it was really exciting, really fun for a couple of days until I came into work one day and I found a hand-addressed letter in my envelope, which was a little odd because I never really get hand-addressed mail anymore.

I don't know about you,

but it always is the email variety. Anyway, I opened up the letter and, you know, I was instantly

confronted with lots of hate-filled messages and ugly drawings and racial slurs. It was a truly

terrifying moment. I never received a letter like that before.

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