Research examining social influences on pain has largely neglected the impact of
friends, while studies on the social context of emotional display have demonstrated
differences in expressivity in the presence of friends versus strangers. Given that pain is a
universal phenomenon with both affective and sensory components, it appeared
important to merge and extend research in both pain and emotions domains by examining
the role of friends as determinants of pain experience and expression. An experimental
investigation was undertaken to examine the impact of friendship, as a feature of
audience effects and social modeling, on pain expression, as well as to examine the
impact of menstrual factors that have been hypothesized to contribute to young women's
current pain experience.
Participants were female undergraduate students from the University of British
Columbia. They were randomly assigned to undergo the cold pressor task with either a
friend or a stranger, resulting in 52 pairs of friends and 52 pairs of strangers. Half of the
participants had been exposed to the friend or stranger undertaking the task in advance of
their own exposure to the cold pressor, so as to examine social modeling phenomenon.
Measures of pain expression included self-rated pain intensity and unpleasantness,
behavioural tolerance time, and facial pain activity.
Robust social modeling effects were observed in all measures of pain, with the
bulk of the modeling effect being expression modality-specific. A differential social
modeling effect of friends vs. strangers was observed only in pain facial activity.
Women's dysmenorrhea status and its severity, when evident, were unrelated to current
pain expression. The presence of friends significantly facilitated expression of disgust
but no significant group differences were observed for other emotions. Results are
discussed from social communication model of pain and evolutionary perspectives and
highlight individuals' apparent innate propensity to evaluate the costs and benefits
associated with social communication. Future research is needed to elucidate factors that
influence the transmission and reception of social information. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/16969 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Wang, Tina Chi |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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