The modulation of pain by visual emotional stimulation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We experience pain as a unified perception, which actually results from the integration of sensory, cognitive and emotional processing in the brain. Studies show that both emotional state and attention influence our pain experience, with emotions preferentially altering the unpleasantness of pain and distraction altering the perceived pain intensity. In the laboratory, odors or music have been used both as distracters and to manipulate mood state, and these manipulations alter pain perception as well. Other data show that observing emotional pictures, including pictures of faces expressing emotions, alters emotional state. Yet, little is known about how emotional pictures affect pain perception. Thus, this thesis explores the effect of visual emotional stimulation on pain perception. We used pictures as mood inducers and we manipulated the attention of the subjects by directing their attention back and forth between the experimentally-induced heat pain and the emotional stimuli. In the first pilot study, we used complex scenes of positive, negative and neutral valence, and in the three following studies we used emotional faces expressing happiness, sadness and neutral. We collected ratings of pain intensity, pain unpleasantness and mood on visual analog scales. In the last study, the valence of the emotional faces had a significant effect on pain intensity, pain unpleasantness and mood ratings such that subjects reported less pain intensity, less pain unpleasantness and a better mood when viewing happy faces compared to when viewing sad faces. The direction of attention, however, did not have a significant effect on any of the ratings. Although our final study design failed to manipulate attention, the emotional faces that we used modulated mood and pain perception effectively. Thus, the studies presented in this thesis show that viewing emotional faces alters both the perceived intensity and unpleasantness of pain and provide support for the use of emotional faces as mood inducers and for the use of emotional faces to study the effects of discrete emotions on pain perception.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 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".