Author: Coll, M.-P.; Budell, L.; Rainville, P.; Decety, J.; Jackson, P.L.
Description: While self-pain motivates protective behaviors and self-oriented feelings, the perception of others’ pain often motivates concern and prosocial behaviors toward the person suffering. The conflicting consequences of these 2 states raise the question of how pain is perceived in others when one is actually in pain. Two conflicting hypotheses could predict the interaction between these 2 signals: the threat value of pain hypothesis and the shared-representation model of pain empathy. Here, we asked 33 healthy volunteers exposed to acute experimental pain to judge the intensity of the pain felt by models expressing different levels of pain in video clips. Results showed that compared to a control warm stimulus, a stimulus causing self-pain increased the perception of others’ pain for clips depicting male pain expressions but decreased the perceived intensity of female high pain expressions in both male and female participants. These results show that one’s own pain state influences the perception of pain in others and that the gender of the person observed influences this interaction.
PERSPECTIVE: By documenting the effects of self-pain on pain perception in others, this study provides a better understanding of the shared mechanisms between self-pain and others’ pain processing. It could ultimately provide clues as to how the health status of health care professionals could affect their ability to assess their patients’ pain.
Subject headings: Adult; Empathy; Facial Expression; Female; Humans; Male; Pain–psychology; Pain Perception; Photic Stimulation; Self Concept; Sex Characteristics; Social Perception
Publication year: 2012
Journal or book title: The Journal of Pain : Official Journal of the American Pain Society
Volume: 13
Issue: 7
Pages: 695-703
Find the full text : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1526590012006207
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Type: Journal Article
Serial number: 546