Study Explores Fear of Pain

Here's something to think about when waiting outside a dentist's office. Fear of pain is greater than pain itself, according to a new study.

In situations where pain is inevitable, people will do anything to avoid it, even if it means suffering from more pain.

We have all experienced this 'getting it done with' moment either while waiting for a physically painful procedure (dentist's office) or while taking a test. Researchers are surprised by this stress response which questions standard theories on decision making that suggest that humans would prefer delaying pain rather than hasten it.

"When people are offered a reward, they prefer to have it as soon as possible, which could be interpreted to mean that we rate future experiences as less important when we're making decisions. This reasoning would suggest that you would put off unpleasant things to the future as well," Dr Giles Story, from the IGHI at Imperial, said in a news release.

"We found that this isn't the case for most people. If pain can't be avoided, most people choose to get it out of the way sooner, even if that means the pain is worse," Story added.

The study was conducted by researchers at Institute of Global Health Innovation (IGHI) at Imperial College London and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL. Their study involved 35 people who were asked to choose between electric shocks of different intensities occurring at different times.

Researchers found that few people chose to delay pain. Most people in the group decided to get the electric shock right away, even if the intensity was high. The team found similar results when they asked other volunteers to imagine dental appointments with varying levels of pain.

The study is published in the journal PLOS Computational Biology.                               

Previous research has shown that personality might affect a person's response to pain with introverts reporting more pain than extroverts. Stanford researchers, too, have found a relationship between anxiety and level of pain. Understanding pain is essential in developing treatments for people suffering from chronic diseases.