The Effects Of Social Support On Pain In Cold Pressor Test

Pain is one of the most common diseases in our everyday life. Pain is a complex psychological and physiological process, including emotion, cognition, motivational and physiological ingredients. The occurrence and development of pain are affected not only by physical factors but also by psychological factors. Social support has an important influence on pain because supportors can give pain patients love, care and encouragement.The researches in the field of clinical pain researches show that the support of significant others and spouses can effectively relieve pain of chronic pain patients. The researchers are also studying the effect of social support on pain in laboratory in which pain is induced by some apparatus. In these studies researchers mainly study the effects of active support and negative support on subjects’ response to pain. The findings of these researches suggest that no matter friends’ support or strangers’ support significantly improve the endurance of subjects, especially for women. Due to the actual support may not be all the time, in this case, researchers study if mental activation of supports can have a beneficial effect on subjects’ response in anxiety and other tasks.The mental activation of support can get through subliminal priming and conscious reminder such as recall exercise. In these studies, the researchers compared the effect between the mental representation of supporters and the actual support. The results show that the mental activation of support has a similar effect as the actual support. But there is few paper studying mental activation of support in the field of pain.In a2009research in school of psychology in California university, researchers study how boyfriends’ actual support and looking the picture of boyfriends influence one’s response to pain using heat stimulation. The results of this study found that just the photo of the boyfriend can effectively relieve the pain. However, in this study, the subjects are very small, only a few more the twenty, the results may exist random factors. Furthermore this study use thermal stimuli triggering pain, pain duration is very short, but chronic pain patients’ pain time is very long, so the results has yet to be further researched. Our research tries to study if mental representation of supporters can have a similar effects as actual support in a clod pressor test. Subjects in this condition are required to immerse their hands in ice water as long as possible, so the pain time is very long.In Experiment1,84subjects participated in the experiment. Subjects were randomly assigned to the control group (do the experiment alone), mental activation group and the actual support group, the way of mental activation is coped from the research of Margit.In the actual support group, supporters can use words, gestures and other positive support. The experimental results show that the actual support of friends increase the individual pain tolerance, but mental activation of support didn’t get the same effect. Mental activation of support didn’t have a great influence.In the second experiment, subjects are randomly assigned to one of the three group: control group (do experiment alone),seeing photos group, actual support group. The results show that looking friends’ photos didn’t have a great effects.The actual support increases subjects’ pain tolerance significantly.The research investigates the influence of mental activation of support and actual support on subjects’ response, the results shows that actual support increases subjects’ pain tolerance significantly,however,mental activation of support didn’t have a great impact on pain in cold pressor test.