An Evolutionary Perspective on Pain Communication

Abstract

Pain serves as a signal to elicit care from others. In turn, displaying pain might be attractive because of the benefits it might bring. Additionally, displaying pain is easy, because helpers distinguish poorly between genuine pain and faked pain. Hence, helpers face the problem of distinguishing true sufferers from free riders, while sufferers face the problem of communicating need convincingly. This article will propose solutions to these adaptive problems. Based on theoretical arguments and on empirical insights from lie detection research, it will be argued that the credibility of pain signals cannot be found in features of the signal itself, but in its context. Namely, pain is obviously credible when the context features unforgeable cues, such as an open wound or the enlarged abdomen of a pregnant woman, but also external cues such as the ice water in cold pressor tasks. In absence of such cues, pain can become credible through costly consequences, such as refraining from rewarding behaviors for a significant period. However, these adaptive mechanisms for communicating need may not be shaped for modern circumstances such as experimental settings and therapeutic encounters.

Feeling Hurt: Revisiting the Relationship Between Social and Physical Pain

“…Certainly, being vulnerable may provide secondary social gains (see, for example, Gray & Wegner, 2011); at a basic level, credible signals of physical pain show others we need assistance and can generate empathy (K. D. Craig, 2009;K. D. Craig, Versloot, Goubert, Vervoort, & Crombez, 2010;Hadjistavropoulos et al, 2011;Steinkopf, 2016). Shared pain can bring people together (Bastian, Jetten, & Ferris, 2014), but nuanced sociorelational outcomes appear not to be the direct priority of resource accumulation activities after physical pain.…”

A ritual by any other name

“…This has a number of implications for the evolution of health and healing: The prosocial environment of humans should favor symptoms that signal suffering convincingly and motivate others to acknowledge the sick state and grant help and treatment (Steinkopf 2015;Tiokhin 2016). Marked displays of pain in humans might be selected for their effectiveness in mobilizing others' support (Finlay & Syal 2014;Steinkopf 2016;Williams 2002). Self-injury and suicidal behavior (Hagen et al 2008;Nock 2008) and the use of invasive and harmful treatments (de Barra & Cownden 2016) have been hypothesized to serve as highly costly signals to convince others of the victim's neediness.…”

Physical Cue Influences Children’s Empathy for Pain: The Role of Attention Allocation

“…The ability of empathy is closely related to the evaluation of other’s pain ( Goubert et al, 2005 ; Decety and Svetlova, 2012 ), but also gives rise to the problem of faking pain to one’s own advantage. Fortunately, previous research has suggested us that both pain ( Steinkopf, 2016 ) and empathy ( Melloni et al, 2014 ) are context-dependent, meaning that people could avoid showing empathy for other’s fake pain with the help of contextual cue. Evolutionally, we would expect children could take advantage of contextual cue (especially physical cue) to show empathy for pain.…”

“…Many studies have showed that empathy for pain is highly context-dependent ( Gonzalez-Liencres et al, 2013 ; Melloni et al, 2014 ). Thus, people would take advantage of contextual cues to make decisions, as they could provide us explainable information and would benefit causal reasoning ( Steinkopf, 2016 ).…”

“…But, during the process to communicate pain, “wounded person” may have an advantage from manipulating the observer. In the other words, observer is always in a passive position ( Steinkopf, 2016 ). Additionally, comparing with social cues such as facial expression of pain and verbal report, physical cues such as an open wound would induce a robust and stronger reaction ( Vachon-Presseau et al, 2011 ).…”