Factors Affecting Pain Tolerance
Clinical studies by the journal of Psychosomatic Medicine found that "men had higher pain thresholds and tolerances and lower pain ratings than women" when exposed to cold pressor pain. The study asked participants to submerge their hands in ice water (the cold pressor pain procedure) and told members of the experimental group (as opposed to the control group) that they would be compensated financially for keeping their hand submerged. Suggested explanations for this difference include that "men are more motivated to tolerate and suppress expressions of pain because of the masculine sex role, whereas the feminine sex role encourages pain expression and produces lower motivation to tolerate pain among women."
A similar study published in the same journal focused on the effects of having individuals perform the ice water procedure while accompanied by another participant. Their results revealed that "Participants in the active support and passive support conditions reported less pain than participants in the alone and interaction conditions, regardless of whether they were paired with a friend or stranger. These data suggest that the presence of an individual who provides passive or active support reduces experimental pain."
Read more about this topic: Pain Tolerance
Famous quotes containing the words factors, affecting, pain and/or tolerance:
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“There is a higher law affecting our relation to pines as well as to men. A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
—Audre Lorde (1934–1992)