Abstract
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.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: June 18, 2012
Accepted:
April 27,
2012
Received in revised form:
April 24,
2012
Received:
October 17,
2011
Footnotes
Supported by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) graduate scholarship (M.-P.C.), a post-doctoral CIHR scholarship (P.L.J.), and a CIHR New Investigator salary grant (P.L.J.). This research was supported by NSERC grants (P.R., P.L.J.).
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
