“ Just a little scratch ”

Discussion I haven’t described the second experiment because of space, but go ahead and read it. Essentially they added some more participants, varied the procedure a little to reduce the memory burden on participants, and added a “medium” underprediction element into the process. The results showed similar outcomes – lower ratings of pain in both the “you won’t feel a thing” and the “it’ll hurt but not much” experiments, and yet again, less trust in the experimenter suggesting that it wouldn’t hurt. Lessons to learn? Think carefully about inflating how much pain relief someone will experience, especially if you’re going to see that person again. While people might experience less pain, losing someone’s trust in a therapeutic setting is a serious problem. The authors point out that healthy volunteers in a lab setting, getting short-term pain, is not like a therapeutic setting where it’s probable that trust is well-established. We don’t know what effect violating trust in a longer-term relationship might have. At the same time – it does strike me as intriguing that simply being told “it won’t hurt” can influence pain intensity rating. What’s going on? How can a communication stimulus influence an experience? How could a psychological input change the way we perceive a noxious stimulus? Perhaps the way forward might be to use neutral language or, ...
Source: HealthSkills Weblog - Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Tags: Pain Psychology Research Health Therapeutic approaches Source Type: blogs