How people perceive the amount of pain others are feeling is partly based on character traits of the pain sufferers, a UNBC researcher has determined.
The more negative characteristics that person is thought to have, the better the chances that person's pain will be downgraded, says Dr. Ken Prkachin, who teamed up with five university researchers in Belgium for the study.
"When we dislike a person, we tend to underestimate the amount of pain they are in,"
said Prkachin, a psychology professor at UNBC. "We found that people associated with negative traits - egotism, arrogance, hypocrisy - had their level of pain consistently underrated, even when they were, in fact, in considerable pain."
The findings of the study were published in the latest issue of Pain, the official journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain.
While the study is geared toward health professionals, ordinary citizens were used as test subjects. They were first shown still photographs of the pain sufferers and told negative attributes about that person to create a sense of dislike. A series of videos was then shown and people were told to watch facial expressions to estimate the levels of discomfort of the pain sufferers as they moved their injured shoulders in physiotherapy assessment tests.
"It doesn't make them change the way their pain is rated if you artificially make someone like someone else," said Prkachin. "But if you artificially make someone dislike someone else they will say they are in less pain than other groups. It also makes the observer less sensitive to the actual evidence of pain that's there and you become a poor perceiver of the actual behaviour."
The problem compounds itself with back injuries, which are usually not visible, and people who can't see evidence of an injury have a greater tendency to not believe the pain is there, especially when they don't like that person, Prkachin said.
He also said health-care practitioners see pain so often in their jobs, and in such broad ranges, they tend to discount it.
"It's been shown in a couple of studies that people who should be good at picking up evidence of pain in others are actually not, and some studies have shown health-care providers have a greater bias against seeing people in pain than the average guy on the street," he said.
Prkachin hopes the study will be used to educate people and create awareness especially in the health-care industry that those biases exists and in most cases can be easily corrected.
"We showed in one study you can eliminate the bias simply by telling the person who is doing the judging to try see this from the other guy's perspective and try to emphasize with them a bit more," he said. "I think this has general bearing on the whole issue of how we respond to pain."
