Sexism-Related Stigma Affects Pain Perception.

Ming Zhang,Yuqi Zhang,Yazhuo Kong,Li Hu,Zhihui Li,Jianzhong Su

doi:10.1155/2021/6612456

Abstract

People with stigmatized characteristics tend to be devalued by others in a given society. The negative experiences related to stigma cause individuals to struggle as they would if they were in physical pain and bring various negative outcomes in the way that physical pain does. However, it is unclear whether stigma related to one's identity would affect their perception of physical pain. To address this issue, using sexism-related paradigms, we found that females had reduced pain threshold/tolerance in the Cold Pressor Test (Experiment 1) and an increased rating for nociceptive laser stimuli with fixed intensity (Experiment 2). Additionally, we observed that there was a larger laser-evoked N1, an early laser-evoked P2, and a larger magnitude of low-frequency component in laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) in the stigma condition than in the control condition (Experiment 3). Our study provides behavioral and electrophysiological evidence that sexism-related stigma affects the pain perception of females.

Highlights

Stigma is viewed as a disgraceful identity that includes a devalued social attribute [1]
We conducted a oneway analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the average scores of the pain sensitivity, with the condition as the between-participant factor
The results showed no significant differences in pain sensitivity across the four conditions (Fð3, 125Þ = 1:28, p = 0:283), suggesting that participants were homogeneous in terms of pain sensitivity

Summary

Introduction

Stigma is viewed as a disgraceful identity that includes a devalued social attribute [1]. When individuals describe the feelings of being rejected or devalued, they describe their experience with words indicating physical sensations, for example, “painful.” The negative feelings and unpleasant experiences arising from stigma affect an individual’s social interaction [2] and might modulate their physical perception. Individuals with chronic pain will be vulnerable to the social consequences and negative psychology associated with stigma [3]. Stigma is internalized by people with chronic pain, who may themselves endorse stigmatizing statements [4]. Data from people who had low back pain suggested that stigma was associated with greater intensity of perception of chronic pain [6]. Stigmatization is the main source of social consequences for these people who have a stigmatized identity [7]

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Discussion

Conclusion