Question

What biological, psychological, and social cultural influences affect our experience of pain? How do placebos, distraction, and hypnosis help control pain? Provide example from your experience in your answer.

Note: the answer should be three paragraphs, cited, and use chapter 6 of Myers and DeWall psychology text book. (12e)

Answer 1

• Pain is an alarm system that draws our attention to some physical problem. Without the ability to experience pain, people may die before early adulthood. Our individual pain sensitivity varies, too, depending on genes, physiology, experience, attention, and surrounding culture.
• Thus, our experience of pain reflects both bottom-up sensations and top-down cognition. There is no one type of stimulus that triggers pain. Instead there are different nociceptors—sensory receptors in our skin, muscles, and organs that detect hurtful temperatures, pressure, or chemicals.
• Melzack and Wall’s gate-control theory of pain is that small fibers in the spinal cord open a “gate” to permit pain signals to travel up to the brain, or large fibers close the “gate” to prevent their passage. Pain is not merely a physical phenomenon of injured nerves sending impulses to a definable brain area. The brain can also create pain, as it does in people’s experiences of phantom limb sensations, after a limb has been amputated.
• The biopsychosocial approach views pain not only as a product of biological influences, for example, of injured nerves sending impulses to the brain, but also as a result of psychological influences such as our expectations, and social influences such as the presence of others.
• For example,when I had an injury in my leg,the local tissues were disturbed.This was followed by anxiety and depression,since I could not walk for 3months because of the pain.
• We have some built-in pain controls, the endorphins, that our brain releases. Other pain controls involve distraction, an inert placebo (by dampening the central nervous system’s attention and responses to painful experiences), the tendency to remember only its peak moment or the pain we felt at the end of a procedure, and hypnosis.
• In trying to explain how hypnosis works, dissociation theory suggests that we have a divided consciousness, as evidenced by the fact that hypnotized people may carry out posthypnotic suggestions.
• Social influence theory believes that hypnosis is a by-product of normal social and mental processes. Another form of dual processing;selective attention may also play a role in hypnotic pain relief.