Attitudes and emotions towards pain and sensitivity to painful stimuli among people routinely engaging in masochistic behaviour

Abstract

MB individuals exhibited pain hyposensitivity, presumably resulting from frequent engagement in MB. Alternatively, these subjects may have a predisposition which enables this engagement. Attitudes towards pain in MB individuals are complex. They appear to be context-related with pain experienced as pleasurable and rewarding during S&M sessions, and negative but still pleasurable in everyday life.

What Is So Appealing About Being Spanked, Flogged, Dominated, or Restrained? Answers from Practitioners of Sexual Masochism/Submission

“…This result is at odds with most nonscientific books concerning m/s (e.g., first-person accounts), which specify that ordinary pain is not pleasurable. However, it accords with the suggestion that m/s practitioners' baseline pain threshold is higher than average (Defrin et al, 2015;Pollok et al, 2010). This possibility should be tested empirically.…”

Bondage-Discipline, Dominance-Submission and Sadomasochism (BDSM) From an Integrative Biopsychosocial Perspective: A Systematic Review

“…2 studies gauging pain thresholds in masochistic subjects98, 99 demonstrated that masochists displayed pain hyposensitivity. This finding was corroborated by Luo and Zhang, 100 who showed that submissive women have lower differential amplitudes of several event-related potentials, compared with control subjects, when looking at pictures of women with painful and neutral facial expressions.…”

“…This, thus, seems to suggest that submissives perceive pain as less threatening and may be associated with lower (negative) emotional appraisal of pain-related stimuli. A link between painful stimulation and the experience of pleasure was investigated by Defrin and colleagues, 99 demonstrating that the number of stimulated body regions—as reported by the respondents on a self-developed questionnaire including 7 body regions (including “upper back,” “lower back,” “buttock,” and “legs”; r = 0.781, P < .001)—as well as the intensity of pain during BDSM play, as scored on a visual analogue scale (r = 0.414; P < .05), correlated highly with the amount of pleasure experienced by these participants. In contrast, both masochists and non-BDSM control subjects reported equal levels of negative emotions while experiencing pain in everyday life 98, 99…”

Pain sensitivity is associated with general attitudes towards pain: Development and validation of a new instrument for pain research and clinical application

“…Pain catastrophizing could explain 15.3% of the variance in pain intensity ratings during an upper limb neurodynamic test (Beneciuk et al, 2010) and has been associated with an increased sensitivity to heat pain (Edwards et al, 2006) as well as cold pain (Kristiansen et al, 2014). Interestingly, people with sadomasochistic (SM) sexual preferences demonstrate less pain catastrophizing and lower pain sensitivity (Defrin et al, 2015), raising the question of the influence of positive attitudes towards pain on pain perception and pointing to the necessity to investigate different kinds of pain attitudes simultaneously. Besides pain catastrophizing and fear of pain, it has been shown that hypochondriacal attitudes (Pauli et al, 1993) are associated with an increased sensitivity to pain, which could potentially be explained by a tendency to view pain as something threatening but also as something reinforced by an increase in the care received by loved ones.…”

“…Studies on pain attitudes and experimental pain in healthy participants have primarily focused on pain catastrophizing (e.g. Beneciuk et al, 2010; Defrin et al, 2015; Edwards et al, 2006; Kristiansen et al, 2014) and fear of pain (e.g. Beneciuk et al, 2010; Hirsh et al, 2008; Trost et al, 2014).…”