The following is a summary of “In search of conditioned pain: an experimental analysis,” published in the November 2023 issue of Pain by Kang et al.
Scientists debate whether pain can be learned, but evidence suggests otherwise. Researchers performed a retrospective study to investigate the idea of conditioned pain in a virtual reality task.
Participants were trained to associate one pen color (CS+) with a painful stimulus and another pen color (CS−) with no pain. In the test phase, a higher rate of (“false alarms”) for the CS+ indicated evidence of conditioned pain.
Key distinctions between the experiments included the location of the painful stimulus delivery between the thumb and index finger (experiment 1; n = 23) and virtual touch to the hand (experiment 2; n = 28). The conditioning procedure was successful in all three experiments, with higher self-reported fear, attention, pain, fear, and US expectancy for CS+ compared to CS− (P < 0.0005). While there was no clear evidence of conditioned pain in Experiment 1, some evidence was found in Experiments 2 and 3. These results suggested that conditioned pain may exist, although it might be relatively rare or context-specific.
More research is needed to understand the conditions and processes that cause conditioned pain, such as response bias.
