High Levels of Vicarious Exposure Bias Pain Judgments

A biopsychosocial formulation of pain communication.

“…Prkachin and Rocha (2010) demonstrated that pre-exposure to pain expressions (through repeated presentation of videos of individuals showing strong pain) diminished the likelihood of observers judging others to be in pain. Detecting, estimating and interpreting the pain of others has important implications for optimal clinical decision making, delivery of everyday care for pain, whether in clinical or non-professional settings (Chambers et al, 2002;Prkachin et al, 2007).…”

When you dislike patients, pain is taken less seriously

“…Factors related to the sufferer are the expression of pain [14,41] or the physical attractiveness of the pain sufferer [16,17,18]. Factors related to the observer, are observers' catastrophizing about (the sufferer's) pain [14,35], or observers' past experience with pain of others [28]. Also contextual factors play a role, such as the presence of a medical cause for pain [4,5,36,37].…”

“…Insight into the processes underlying pain estimations is important [28,30]. Pain estimation might reflect two processes: observers may be sensitive to a patient's pain (i.e., 3 being able to discriminate between levels of pain), and/or have a general tendency to ascribe pain to a patient (i.e., response bias) without taking into account a patient's pain cues.…”

Insensitivity to suffering: the relation of psychopathic traits to somatic processing, first-person and third-person pain.

“…This was done because previous studies examining third-person pain perception that included high-intensity pain expressions yielded measures of sensitivity that were thought to be too high to capture the range of individual differences anticipated to relate to psychopathic deficits in the present study (e.g., Prkachin et al, 2004;Prkachin & Rocha, 2010;Wojakiewicz et al, 2013). Additionally, participants were undergraduate students and thus unlikely to score high on psychopathic characteristics.…”

“…These categories were selected in order to produce a test o f sufficient difficulty to capture individual differences in perceptual sensitivity to pain expression. Previous studies of third-person pain using a test that included high-intensity pain expressions have yielded measures of sensitivity that were thought to be too high to capture the range of individual differences anticipated to relate to psychopathic deficits in the present study (e.g., Prkachin, Mass & Mercer, 2004;Prkachin & Rocha, 2010;Wojakiewicz, Januel, Braha, Prkachin, Danziger & Bouhassira, 2013). Each o f the video clips had been previously scored for amount of pain expression using a system based on Ekman and Friesen's (1978) Facial Action Coding System.…”