Abstract
The present study evaluated the effects of exposure to facial expression of pain,
on observers' perceptions of pain expression. Participants were undergraduates shown
brief video clips of the facial expressions of shoulder-pain patients displaying no
pain or moderate pain. Participants were randomly allocated to either a high preexposure
condition in which each clip was preceded by 10 other clips showing strong pain or
a no-exposure control. On each test trial, participants indicated whether they thought
the person they saw was in pain or not. Data were analyzed using signal detection
theory methods. High prior exposure to pain was unrelated to sensitivity to pain expression,
but did significantly diminish the likelihood of judging the other to be in pain.
Results are discussed in terms of their implications for pain judgments of health-care
professionals, adaptation-level theory, and the psychophysical method of selective
adaptation.
Perspective
This paper provides an experimental demonstration that, when people have large amounts
of exposure to others' expressions of pain, their estimation of others' pain is reduced.
The findings offer 1 explanation for the widely observed underestimation bias in pain
judgments and may suggest ways of changing it.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: March 15, 2010
Accepted:
December 22,
2009
Received in revised form:
November 25,
2009
Received:
June 29,
2009
Footnotes
Supported by grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research.
Identification
Copyright
© 2010 Published by Elsevier Inc.
