• Pain · Dec 2010

    Knowing you care: effects of perceived empathy and attachment style on pain perception.

    • Chiara F Sambo, Matthew Howard, Michael Kopelman, Steven Williams, and Aikaterini Fotopoulou.
    • Psychology Department, King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, London SE1 9RT, UK. a.fotopoulou@kcl.ac.uk
    • Pain. 2010 Dec 1;151(3):687-93.

    AbstractOther people can have a significant impact on one's pain. Although correlational data abound, causal relationships between one's pain experience, individual traits of social relating (e.g. attachment style), and social factors (e.g. empathy) have not been investigated. Here, we studied whether the presence of others and 'perceived empathy' (defined as participants' knowledge of the extent to which observers felt they understood and shared their pain) can modulate subjective and autonomic responses to pain; and whether these influences can be explained by individual traits of pain coping and social attachment. Participants received noxious thermal stimuli via a thermode attached to their forearm and were asked to rate their pain. In separate blocks they were witnessed by (a) high-empathic and (b) low-empathic unfamiliar observers, and in a third condition (c) no observer was present (alone condition). We found that the effects of social presence and empathy on pain ratings depended on individual differences in attachment style. Higher scores on attachment anxiety predicted higher pain ratings in the low-empathy than in the high-empathy condition; and higher scores on attachment avoidance predicted lower pain ratings in the alone condition than with social presence. In addition, social presence decreased autonomic responses to pain irrespective of individual personality traits. To our knowledge this is the first time that adult attachment style has been shown to modulate the effects of social presence and 'perceived empathy' on experimentally induced pain. The results are discussed in relation to recent cognitive models of pain coping and attachment theory.Copyright © 2010 International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

      Pubmed     Full text   Copy Citation     Plaintext  

      Add institutional full text...

    Notes

     
    Knowledge, pearl, summary or comment to share?
    300 characters remaining
    help        
    You can also include formatting, links, images and footnotes in your notes
    • Simple formatting can be added to notes, such as *italics*, _underline_ or **bold**.
    • Superscript can be denoted by <sup>text</sup> and subscript <sub>text</sub>.
    • Numbered or bulleted lists can be created using either numbered lines 1. 2. 3., hyphens - or asterisks *.
    • Links can be included with: [my link to pubmed](http://pubmed.com)
    • Images can be included with: ![alt text](https://bestmedicaljournal.com/study_graph.jpg "Image Title Text")
    • For footnotes use [^1](This is a footnote.) inline.
    • Or use an inline reference [^1] to refer to a longer footnote elseweher in the document [^1]: This is a long footnote..

    hide…