The context of a noxious stimulus affects the pain it evokes
- 1 December 2007
- journal article
- Published by Ovid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health) in Pain
- Vol. 133 (1), 64-71
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2007.03.002
Abstract
Hot, more tissue damaging) or blue (cold, less tissue damaging) visual cue was used. For warning, the stimulus occurred after the cue or they occurred together. For visual attention, subjects looked towards the stimulus or away from it. Repeated measures ANCOVA was significant (α = 0.0125). Stimuli associated with a red cue were rated as hot, with the blue cue as cold (difference on an 11 point scale ∼5.5). The red cue also meant the pain was rated as more unpleasant (difference ∼3.5) and more intense (difference ∼3). For stimuli associated with the red cue only, the pain was more unpleasant when the stimulus occurred after the cue than when it didn’t (difference ∼1.1). Pain was rated as more intense, and the stimulus as hotter, when subjects looked at the red-cued stimulus than when they didn’t (difference ∼0.9 for pain intensity and ∼2 for temperature). We conclude that meaning affects the experience a noxious stimulus evokes, and that warning and visual attention moderate the effects of meaning when the meaning is associated with tissue-damage. Different dimensions of the stimulus’ context can have differential effects on sensory-discriminative and affective-emotional components of pain....Keywords
This publication has 51 references indexed in Scilit:
- The meaning of pain influences its experienced intensityPain, 2004
- Conscious Expectation and Unconscious Conditioning in Analgesic, Motor, and Hormonal Placebo/Nocebo ResponsesJournal of Neuroscience, 2003
- A Functional Anatomy of Anticipatory AnxietyNeuroImage, 1999
- Underpredicted pain disrupts more than correctly predicted pain, but does not hurt moreBehaviour Research and Therapy, 1998
- CORTICAL PLASTICITY: From Synapses to MapsAnnual Review of Neuroscience, 1998
- Do patients with chronic pain selectively attend to pain-related information?: preliminary evidence for the mediating role of fearPain, 1997
- Habituation and the interference of pain with task performancePain, 1997
- The disruptive nature of pain: An experimental investigationBehaviour Research and Therapy, 1996
- The influence of anxiety on pain: attentional and attributional mediatorsPain, 1994
- Predictions of dental pain: The fear of any expected evil, is worse than the evil itselfBehaviour Research and Therapy, 1990