Pain has been very helpful to us people. It warns us against painful stimuli that can be damaging to our body. Aside from this function, there are so much to learn from pain. And it is very complex like any other topic in perception. From the classic studies about pain, they said that pain actually starts from the skin then going to the brain. It is a bottom-up process of pain, but pain perception has other factors that may affect our experience of pain. How we perceive pain is also affected by our attention, experience, distraction, and other cognitive functions. In recent studies, there were significant results that had concluded the gender and age differences in perceiving pain. To make the story short, pain has been very subjective to people and it is different among contexts and these are proved by recent studies.
Aside from the physical aspect of pain (sensory component), there is an affective aspect (affective component) that is mostly the subjective part for people. As the intensity is for physical, the unpleasantness is for affective. Studies showed that theses two aspects or components, not just the physical or sensory, have stimulation in particular aspect of the brain. The physical aspect has stimulation in the primary somatosensory cortex while the affective is in the anterior cingulated cortex.
And aside from directly experiencing pain, there are also studies that show pain of other people can be experienced by the self. This process is called empathy wherein the stimulation in the brain of physical aspect or component is overlapping with the stimulation from the looking at a person experiencing pain.
From these differences from previous studies, it was became an interest for Cheng and coworkers (2007) to study if empathy had been existing to most people or just some? And if people who see other people undergo pain eventually became habituated and experience no pain at all from other’s experience. They conducted an experiment wherein
A week before scanning the brain, participants, who were physicians with experience with acupuncture and people with no experience, were asked to fill out a series of self-report dispositional measures, including the situational pain questionnaire (SPQ) that assess sensitivity to pain, the emotional contagion scale (ECS), the interpersonal reactivity index (IRI), and the empathy quotient (EQ). Functional MRI scanning consisted of three runs: (1) one with the mouth region, (2) one with the foot region, (3) one with the hand region. The visual stimuli were shown randomly in each run included three repetitions of the situations with body parts being either touched by Q-tip (nonpainful)or pricked by a needle (painful).
After being scanned, participants were asked to rate pain intensity and pain unpleasantness with the same visual dynamic situations that they had seen in the scanner with no pain to extreme pain and no effect to extreme unpleasantness as target words.
Results showed the difference in the neurohemodynamic response between two groups of participants who were physicians with practice in acupuncture, experts; and age and educational matched individuals, controls. Physicians had detached perspective in distressing and painful situations of other people, which they achieved through years of practice.
Therefore, the anterior insula and anterior cingulated cortex (ACC), which were important in affective component, would not show increased activation in the physician group. But instead, regions associated with emotion regulation and cognitive control, such as the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, were predicted to show selective activation in brains of physicians.
This study demonstrates that learned experience play a role in the way we perceive other people’s pain . Stimulation and activation in the regions associated with the affective aspects of pain perception, which was detected in the control group, was not observed or seen in physician group.
This knowledge is very important because we can regulate our feelings of unpleasantness from the perception of pain in others, and would be necessary for being successful in our profession, if we were to pursue medicine. But even we are not in the field of medicine or other related fields, we can still use this in our everyday situation and not always in physical situation. Like for example, parents punishing their children, a guy or a girl dumping his or her significant other, a boss scolding his employees, and any other social situations. So therefore, we can say that pain’s importance is just like how complex it is.
Photos from:
http://www.123rf.com/photo_2852632_details-aggressive-doctor-injecting-a-funk-patient.html
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