Embodied models argue that social cognition (e.g., understanding others' affective states, reacting to a mistreatment) is grounded in representations of basal sensory-affective experiences, such as pain and disgust. However, it is unclear whether the information accessed relates to sensory-specific representations of the first-hand state or instead to broader (supra-ordinal) dimensions that act orthogonally between different states, such as unpleasantness, arousal, or salience. In this thesis, I examined the role played by two qualitatively different (but comparably unpleasant) first-hand experiences of pain and disgust on emotional facial processing (Study 1), social exclusion (Studies 2 & 3), and the combination of the two (Study 4). I analyzed behavioural, physiological and neural responses (using fMRI) from healthy participants, which were engaged in a new experimental set-up developed for assessing whether pain and disgust influenced (or were influenced by) social behaviour in dissociated or comparable fashion at sensory-specific or supra-ordinal (unpleasantness) level.