Anticipation of Pain More Painful than the Real Thing
If you’re afraid of needles, you may find that dreading the injection feels more unbearable than the pain brought by the injection itself. Now, new research said this is actually true.
Scientists from the Institute for Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London have found that dreading pain, in some cases, can be more painful than actually experiencing the pain itself. In two experiments, they studied the relationship between time and the dread of pain. The first experiment involved administering electric shocks to the participants. But prior this, they were asked to choose whether they wanted the painful shocks sooner or later (in just a few seconds or as long as 15 minutes in the future). In the second experiments, participants had to decide when they wanted to have a painful dental appointment. They could either had the procedure done on that very day or delay it for up to 237 days into the future. Participants were also given different pain levels for the dental appointments so the researchers could see how the ‘anticipation’ of extreme pain affected their decision to choose the schedule for the appointment, compared with less pain.
Findings revealed that at the group level, participants showed a strong preference for sooner pain, at the expense of an increased number of shocks. According to the researchers, this confirms the existence of a strong effect of dreading pain. This implies that, if people focus only on the approaching pain itself, they will choose to defer pain into the future if possible. On the other hand, prolonged period of dread could exceed the unpleasantness of the pain itself.
"Further research is required to uncover the constitutive mechanisms of dread. For clinicians and health policy makers, a greater understanding of these mechanisms could inform the way in which potentially painful investigations and treatments are practised.” the researchers conclude.
Their work was published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.
Source of this article:
Dreading Pain May Be More Unpleasant Than The Pain Itself, Study Suggests
©Copyright 2013 by http://www.naturaltherapyforall.com Counselling Glasgow All Rights Reserved.