Abstract
Pain perception is influenced by several factors, and among them, affect, sex, and perception of bodily signals are assumed to play a prominent role. The aim of the present study is to explore how sex, cardiac interoceptive accuracy, and the interaction of the latter two influence the perception of experimentally induced pain. We investigated a large sample of young adults (n = 159, 50.9% female, age: 23.45, SD = 3.767), assessing current positive and negative affective state with the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (both involved as control variables), cardiac interoceptive accuracy with the mental heartbeat tracking task, and pain sensitivity with electrical stimulation on the back of the dominant hand, applying a repeated-measures staircase protocol. Males showed a significantly higher pain threshold and tolerance level than females, whereas cardiac interoceptive accuracy was not associated with pain sensitivity. The impact of sex × cardiac interoceptive accuracy interaction was significant for pain threshold only, while pain tolerance was predicted only by sex. According to these findings, the associations between pain sensitivity, cardiac IAc, and sex might be more complicated than it was supposed in previous studies. Interactions between factors impacting pain perception appear worthy of further investigation.
Highlights
Pain is defined as an unpleasant experience with sensory and emotional components, associated with potential tissue damage (Merskey and Bogduk, 1994), and strongly influenced by somatic, psychological, and social factors (Moseley, 2007)
The frequentist approach shows a weak association between positive affect and pain threshold, whereas associations between pain sensitivity and negative affect were not supported
This study investigated the associations between sex and cardiac interoceptive accuracy with measures related to pain perception, i.e., pain threshold and pain tolerance, in 159 young individuals
Summary
Pain is defined as an unpleasant experience with sensory and emotional components, associated with potential tissue damage (Merskey and Bogduk, 1994), and strongly influenced by somatic, psychological, and social factors (Moseley, 2007). Neuroanatomical evidence demonstrates that pain processing shows a considerable overlap, with processing of visceral signals representing the actual homeostatic condition of the body; pain was called the homeostatic emotion (Craig, 2003). Based on these findings, a broad perspective on interoception was proposed, which includes pain, itch, sensual touch, the sense of the metabolic state of the muscles, and other modalities beyond the classic visceroceptive channels (Craig, 2010). Sex, and Cardiac Accuracy used as an indicator of the acuity of perception of interoceptive signals. As the experience of pain is accompanied by a marked cardiovascular response (Gracely, 1999), the use of cardiac IAc is well justified in this area of research
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