Abstract
Accurate assessment of pain by health-care professionals is essential to ensure optimal management of pain. An under-researched area is whether personality characteristics affect perception of pain in others. The aims were (a) to determine whether individual differences are associated with participants’ ability to assess pain, and (b) to determine facial cues used in the assessment of pain. One hundred and twenty-eight undergraduate students participated. They completed questionnaire assessments of empathy, pain catastrophizing, sensory sensitivity and emotional intelligence. They then viewed and rated four adult facial images (no, medium, and high pain—12 images total) using a 0–10 numerical rating scale, and noted the reasons for their ratings. (a) Empathy was the only characteristic associated with accuracy of pain assessment. (b) Descriptions of eyes and mouth, and eyes alone were most commonly associated with assessment accuracy. This was the case despite variations in the expression of pain in the four faces. Future studies could evaluate the effect on accuracy of pain assessment of (a) training empathic skills for pain assessment, and (b) emphasizing attention to the eyes, and eyes and mouth.
Highlights
Pain is a common symptom that motivates people to seek medical treatment
There were no significant differences between the four groups for pain ratings, the groups were combined for further analysis
The first aim was to investigate the roles of gender, empathy, catastrophizing, sensitivity to sensory information, and emotional intelligence in the assessment of pain in others
Summary
Pain is a common symptom that motivates people to seek medical treatment. It is a subjective experience and difficult to quantify in others, yet accurate assessment of pain by health-care professionals is essential to ensure optimal treatment or management of the pain. Hojat and colleagues developed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy [7] to study the role of empathy in health care They compared the empathy scores of female nurses, pediatricians, and physicians. A further individual characteristic was highlighted by Sullivan et al [14], who demonstrated that individuals who scored highly on a measure of pain catastrophizing, tended to perceive more intense pain in others This suggests that the perception of pain in others may be linked with the observer’s ability to process sensory information. Studies of the above personal characteristics have demonstrated individual variation; one aim of the present research was to explore further the roles of gender, empathy, catastrophizing, sensitivity to sensory information, and emotional intelligence in the assessment of pain in others. We used facial expressions of pain, as they have been extensively employed in studies of pain assessment [4,19]
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