Pain can be a relief - ScienceDaily

When something causes less pain than expected it is even possible for it to feel pleasant, a new study reveals. These findings may one day play a key role in treating pain and substance abuse.If you accidently kick your toe against a doorframe you are probably going to find it very painful. As a purely intellectual experiment, imagine purposefully kicking a doorframe hard enough to potentially break your toe. When it turns out your toe has been battered but not broken, the pain may be interpreted more as a relief."It is not hard to understand that pain can be interpreted as less severe when an individual is aware that it could have been much more painful. Less expected, however, is the discovery that pain may be experienced as pleasant if something worse has been avoided," explains Siri Leknes, Research Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo.The lesser of two evilsWhen working as a research fellow at Oxford University, Dr Leknes became curious about what can be called the "it could have been worse" phenomenon. How is the experience of pain affected by a feeling of relief from realising that it was not as bad as expected?Dr Leknes recruited 16 healthy subjects who prepared themselves for a painful experience. They were repeatedly exposed to heat of varying intensity applied to their arm for four seconds.The experiments were carried out in two different contexts: in the first, the heat was either not painful or only moderately painful â€...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs