Thinking About a Loved One Might Reduce Physical Pain.

HealthDay (http://tinyurl.com/love-and-pain 11/26, Preidt) reported that,  “thinking about a loved one might help reduce physical pain.” In an experiment with “25 young women who’d been in a good relationship with a boyfriend for more than six months,” University of California-Los Angeles researchers found that women who “were just looking at pictures of their partner…actually reported less pain to heat stimuli than when they were looking at pictures of an object or pictures of a stranger.” In another “experiment, the women reported less heat-related pain when they held the hand of their boyfriend, compared with when they held the hand of a stranger or held a squeeze ball.”