Pain is also contagious… – Terrible RESEARCH – 2024-07-07 00:12:02 – 2024-07-07 00:12:03 – 2024-07-07 00:16:15

If you show a person before a fictitious medical procedure that it is painful, they may experience anxiety due to self-induction.

Publika.az reports that this was revealed by an experiment published in the journal “Communications Psychology” (Commun. psychol.).

Self-motivation can lead to real improvement when taking ineffective drugs or undergoing procedures – this is known as the placebo effect. But the opposite phenomenon also exists: the nocebo effect. In this case, a person may experience a worsening of his condition due to therapy. This has been quantified in a new study.

In the new experiment, subjects were told they would undergo a procedure that could increase pain. Group “therapy” was performed with a device with a heated plate placed next to the skin: one participant performed the procedure while the other observed. Scientists secretly increased the temperature of the plate to make the procedure painful for the first person.

Then the procedure was performed on the other participants in turn, each of them being first an observer and then a demonstrator. The heating of the plate is increased only for the first patient. However, participants who did not have hot plates also reported pain during the procedure. This means that although only the first of them underwent a truly painful procedure, the pain was passed down the chain from the first demonstrator to the last.

The results suggest that observing another person’s pain during a treatment procedure can result in anxiety for the observer.

Scientists also recorded the physiological response of demonstrators and observers. For this, they evaluated the activity of the sweat glands on the tips of the fingers, as well as the tension of the facial muscles. The indicators confirmed that the participants experienced pain during the sham procedure. Furthermore, the more similar the participants’ physiological responses, the closer their personal ratings of pain were.

“This means that the nocebo effect can cause not only psychological, but also real changes in the body that affect the sensation of pain,” the authors emphasized.

The researchers added that while social group support has traditionally been helpful during treatment, new data suggest that exposure to the negative experiences of others can make pain worse. More research is needed to prove this. It is also important to pay more attention to learning the relationship between expectations and actual feelings before pain treatment.