Sex differences in pain perception and anxiety. A psychophysical study with topical capsaicin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much evidence indicates that women experience painful stimuli as more intense than men do. Nevertheless, some data suggest that sustained low-level pain may be more disturbing to men than to women. The current experiment evaluated the hypothesis that pain is more disturbing for men than for women by comparing across genders sensory and emotional aspects of pain evoked by capsaicin. Ten men and 10 women (aged 20-46 years) received topical capsaicin for 30 min on the face in one session and on the ankle in another. The subjects rated on visual analog scales pain intensity, unpleasantness and anxiety each minute during capsaicin application and for 30 min after its removal. During capsaicin application, females rated both pain intensity (P = 0.04) and unpleasantness (P = 0.05) higher than did males. Further, subjects rated pain intensity and unpleasantness higher on the face than on the ankle, although the physical stimulus was the same. Despite their lower pain ratings, men reported more pain-related anxiety than women (P = 0.02) Moreover, men showed a significant positive correlation between anxiety and pain intensity and unpleasantness, whereas women did not. After removing the capsaicin, there was no overall effect of sex on either intensity (P = 0.18) or unpleasantness (P = 0.37) of the residual sensation. However, men still showed a positive correlation between anxiety and the intensity and unpleasantness of the sensation. Our data confirm with the topical capsaicin model that women rate pain higher than men, but despite their lower pain ratings, males have more anxiety related to 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".