Women's greater fear of pain is mediated by neuroticism

Abstract

Fear of pain is an emotional state linked to a host of negative events, including exaggerated pain perception, distress, and chronic pain. Although many studies have shown that women experience fear of pain more than men do, little is known about the factors that might explain these sex differences. According to an individual-difference approach, it seems valuable to examine the contribution of personality factors, which are considered as major antecedents of cognitions and emotions, including fear. The present study focuses on the potential mediating role of neuroticism – and its six specific facets –in the sex-fear of pain relationship for fear of severe pain, fear of minor pain, and fear of medical pain. Given that neuroticism is greater in women and that this personality trait contributes to the fear of pain, we hypothesized that neuroticism would mediate the sex-fear of pain relationship. Due to the previously established link between experience of pain and the fear of pain, we controlled for the previous experience of pain in the mediation model. Participants (n=133 women; 96 men) completed measures of previous experiences of pain, neuroticism, and fear of pain. Using Preacher and Hayes’ SPSS script, we used a bootstrapping method with n=5000 bootstrap resamples to test the model. Bootstrapped mediation analyses revealed that neuroticism significantly (within a 95% confidence interval) mediated the sex-fear of severe pain relationship. Working within a 90% confidence interval, neuroticism also significantly mediated the sex-fear of pain relationship for fear of minor pain and fear of medical pain. Although the global trait of neuroticism contributed to sex differences in fear of minor pain, it was specifically the neuroticism facet of anxiety that mediated the relationship between sex and fear of severe pain and sex and fear of medical pain. The results suggest that women experience more fear of pain partly because they are more neurotic than men and provide the first evidence that neuroticism in an integral part of the process that differentiates the sexes in fear of pain. Given that the proportion of variance accounted for in each of the mediation models (8% at most), there is a clear need for further research to elucidate more fully the mechanisms that underlie sex differences in the fear of pain.