The Influence Of Temporal Information On Subjects' Pain Reaction

Pain is defined as an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage, according to The International Association for the Study of Pain. It is useful to distinguish between two components of pain, biological and psychological. The biological component of pain is the same as other human feelings, which has an "R-T" pattern, and the psychological component is connected with motivation of avoadance, which changes a lot and subject to past experiences and cultural factors. Among the studies of pain, the effects of temporal information on one's pain behavior need more attention.There wre three experiments. The first experiment hypothesized that the change of water temperature will affect subjects' pain behavior, the lower the temperature, the higher the pain intensity scaling and the lower the pain tolerance and also, the experimenter gender will affect subjects' pain behavior. Results showed that water temperature had a significant influence on subjects' pain behavior, the direction of temperature effect was in line with the hypothesis. But there was no significant main effect of experimenter gender and there was no significant differences between men and women either. There appeared to be no significant differences related to use of the dominant versus the nondominant hand. The second hypothesis was that giving subjects a specific time goal before an experiment would significantly lower their pain intensity scaling and higher their pain tolerance time. Results did verify this hypothesis, and the specific time goal also had significant effect on subjects' pain threshold, those who knew the specifc time goal had a higher pain threshold than those who did not know. And for the last experiment, we hypothesized that gave subjects temporal information on the CPT rocedure would significantly effect subjects' pain behavior, those who got temporal information on how much time have gone/left in numbers did better than those get a cue of dot in the CPT. Results showed that, subjets who got time cues of number reacted better to painful stimuli, they tolerated pain much longer, scaled pain much lower and have a much higher pain threshold. So we concluded that there was cultural conformity in subjects' pain behavior and subjects' pain bahavior was influenced by time cues to the experiment.