Mildly negative social encounters reduce physical pain sensitivity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While previous research has demonstrated a reduction in physical pain sensitivity in response to social exclusion, the manipulations employed have arguably been far removed from typical daily experience. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of relatively ordinary social encounters on the perception of pain. Healthy participants rated the intensity and unpleasantness of painful stimuli before and after engaging in a structured interaction with a confederate who was instructed to either be warm and friendly or indifferent. A control group was asked to perform a similar structured activity, but alone. Consistent with predictions, participants who experienced the mildly negative social exchange reported lower pain intensity and unpleasantness after the encounter relative to baseline, whereas those exposed to the positive social exchange did not evidence any change in pain ratings. These results were not mediated by changes in mood or perceived connectedness. If mildly negative social encounters can provoke an analgesic effect, it is possible that social hypoalgesia may be considerably more commonplace than previously realized. Discussion focuses on the role of stress-induced hypoalgesia, and the implications of the results for clinical assessments of pain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".