Pain assessment in fish is particularly challenging due toBioscience Building, Liverpool, L69 7ZB their evolutionary distance from humans, their lack of audible vocalization, and apparently expressionless demeanour. However, there are criteria that can be used to gauge whether pain perception occurs using carefully executed scientific approaches. Here, the standards for pain in fish are discussed and can be considered in three ways: neural detection and processing of pain; adverse responses to pain; and consciously experiencing (...) class='Hi'>pain. Many procedures that we subject fish to cause tissue damage and may give rise to the sensation of pain. Fish are popular as pets, in animal exhibits, and as experimental models, but are also cultured or caught for food. There is little legislation for the protection of fish welfare. Many countries are now exploring the welfare cost to fish, and current practices may need to be reviewed with respect to the current evidence for fish perceiving pain. (shrink)

Pain perception arises from a complex interaction between a nociceptive stimulus and different emotional and cognitive factors, which appear to be mediated by both automatic and controlled systems. Previous evidence has shown that whereas conscious processing of unpleasant stimuli enhances pain perception, emotional influences on pain under unaware conditions are much less known. The aim of the present study was to investigate the modulation of pain perception by unconscious emotional pictures through an emotional masking paradigm. Two (...) kinds of both somatosensory (painful and non-painful) and emotional stimulation (negative and neutral pictures) were employed. Fifty pain-free participants were asked to rate the perception of pain they were feeling in response to laser-induced somatosensory stimuli as faster as they can. Data from pain intensity and reaction times were measured. Statistical analyses revealed a significant effect for the interaction between pain and emotional stimulation, but surprisingly this relationship was opposite to expected. In particular, lower pain intensity scores and longer reaction times were found in response to negative images being strengthened this effect for painful stimulation. Present findings suggest a clear pain perception modulation by unconscious emotional contexts. Attentional capture mechanisms triggered by unaware negative stimulation could explain this phenomenon leading to a withdrawal of processing resources from pain. (shrink)

Pain is commonly explained in terms of the perceptual activity of a distinct sensory modality, the function of which is to enable us to perceive actual or potential damage to the body. However, the characterization of pain experience in terms of a distinct sensory modality with such content is problematic. I argue that pain is better explained as occupying a different role in relation to perception: to indicate when the stimuli that are sensed in perceiving anything by (...) means of a sensory modality exceed a significant level of intensity. Viewing the system underlying pain experience as an integral and functionally integrated feature of all the senses provides a new perspective on the diverse forms of pain, what it is like to experience pain and the contrasting natures of pain and pleasure. (shrink)

Pain, suffering and positive emotions in patients in vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/uws) and minimally conscious states (MCS) pose clinical and ethical challenges. Clinically, we evaluate behavioural responses after painful stimulation and also emotionally-contingent behaviours (e.g., smiling). Using stimuli with emotional valence, neuroimaging and electrophysiology technologies can detect subclinical remnants of preserved capacities for pain which might influence decisions about treatment limitation. To date, no data exist as to how healthcare providers think about end-of-life options (e.g., withdrawal of (...) artificial nutrition and hydration) in the presence or absence of pain in non-communicative patients. Here, we aimed to better clarify this issue by re-analyzing previously published data on pain perception (Prog Brain Res 2009 177, 329–38) and end-of-life decisions (J Neurol 2010 258, 1058–65) in patients with disorders of consciousness. In a sample of 2259 European healthcare professionals we found that, for VS/uws more respondents agreed with treatment withdrawal when they considered that VS/uws patients did not feel pain (77%) as compared to those who thought VS/uws did feel pain (59%). This interaction was influenced by religiosity and professional background. For MCS, end-of-life attitudes were not influenced by opinions on pain perception. Within a contemporary ethical context we discuss (1) the evolving scientific understandings of pain perception and their relationship to existing clinical and ethical guidelines; (2) the discrepancies of attitudes within (and between) healthcare providers and their consequences for treatment approaches, and (3) the implicit but complex relationship between pain perception and attitudes toward life-sustaining treatments. (shrink)

Everyone knows what is feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what (...) they describe as 'painful' has changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and you wouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? (shrink)

Pain, suffering and positive emotions in patients in vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS) and minimally conscious states (MCS) pose clinical and ethical challenges. Clinically, we evaluate behavioural responses after painful stimulation and also emotionally-contingent behaviours (e.g., smiling). Using stimuli with emotional valence, neuroimaging and electrophysiology technologies can detect subclinical remnants of preserved capacities for pain which might influence decisions about treatment limitation. To date, no data exist as to how healthcare providers think about end-of-life options (e.g., withdrawal of (...) artificial nutrition and hydration) in the presence or absence of pain in non-communicative patients. Here, we aimed to better clarify this issue by re-analyzing previously published data on pain perception (Prog Brain Res 2009 177, 329–38) and end-of-life decisions (J Neurol 2010 258, 1058–65) in patients with disorders of consciousness. In a sample of 2259 European healthcare professionals we found that, for VS/UWS more respondents agreed with treatment withdrawal when they considered that VS/UWS patients did not feel pain (77%) as compared to those who thought VS/UWS did feel pain (59%). This interaction was influenced by religiosity and professional background. For MCS, end-of-life attitudes were not influenced by opinions on pain perception. Within a contemporary ethical context we discuss (1) the evolving scientific understandings of pain perception and their relationship to existing clinical and ethical guidelines; (2) the discrepancies of attitudes within (and between) healthcare providers and their consequences for treatment approaches, and (3) the implicit but complex relationship between pain perception and attitudes toward life-sustaining treatments. (shrink)

When you suffer a pain are you suffering a sensation? An emotion? An aversion? Pain typically has all three components, and others too. There is indeed a distinct sensory system devoted to pain, with its own nociceptors and pathways. As a species of somesthesis, pain has a distinctive sensory organization and its own special sensory qualities. I think it is fair to call it a distinct sensory modality, devoted to nociceptive somesthetic discrimination. But the typical (...) class='Hi'>pain kicks off other processes too. For one it can grab your attention in a distinctive way, alerting you to its presence and sometimes obliging you to focus attention on the damaged member. Intense pain can eliminate your ability to think about anything else. Pain typically has direct and immediate motivational consequences: one wants it to stop, has an incentive to do whatever one can to reduce it, and is gratified by its termination. As these desires and motives collide with neural reality, emotional components of mental anguish, anxiety, and dread arise. The suffering involved in suffering from pain has multiple strands: it is not just the painfulness of the sensation, or the frustration of the desire that it end, but also the anguish over the possibility that it will never end, and the impossibility, if the pain is sufficiently intense, of focusing one’s attention on anything else. (shrink)

This paper examines pain states (and other intransitive bodily sensations) from the perspective of the problems they pose for pure informational/representational approaches to naturalizing qualia. I start with a comprehensive critical and quasi-historical discussion of so-called Perceptual Theories of Pain (e.g., Armstrong, Pitcher), as these were the natural predecessors of the more modern direct realist views. I describe the theoretical backdrop (indirect realism, sense-data theories) against which the perceptual theories were developed. The conclusion drawn is that pure representationalism (...) about pain in the tradition of direct realist perceptual theories (e.g., Dretske, Tye) leaves out something crucial about the phenomenology of pain experiences, namely, their affective character. I touch upon the role that introspection plays in such representationalist views, and indicate how it contributes to the source of their trouble vis-à-vis bodily sensations. The paper ends by briefly commenting on the relation between the affective/evaluative component of pain and the hedonic valence of emotions. (shrink)

Consider the following two sentences: " I see a dark discoloration in the back of my hand. I feel a jabbing pain in the back of my hand. " They seem to have the same surface grammar, and thus prima facie invite the same kind of semantic treatment. Even though a reading of ‘see’ in where the verb is not treated as a success verb is not out of the question, it is not the ordinary and natural reading. Note (...) that if I am hallucinating a dark discoloration in the back of my hand, then is simply false. For to be true, therefore, I have to stand in the seeing relation to a dark discoloration in the back of my hand, i.e., to a certain surface region in the back of my hand marked by a darker shade of the usual color of my skin, a certain region that can be seen by others possibly in the same way in which I see it. Also note that although the truth of doesn’t require the possession of any concept by me expressed by the words making up the sentence, my uttering of to make a report typically does — if we take such utterances as expressions of one’s thoughts. So my seeing would typically induce me to identify something in the back of my hand as a dark discoloration. This is a typical case of categorization of something under a concept induced by perception. Of course, my uttering of does more than attributing a physical property to a bodily region, it also reports that I am seeing it. (shrink)

Postulating the subcortical organization of human consciousness provides a critical link for the construal of pain in patients with impaired cortical function or cortical immaturity during early development. Practical implications of the centrencephalic proposal include the redefinition of pain, improved pain assessment in nonverbal humans, and benefits of adequate analgesia/anesthesia for these patients, which certainly justify the rigorous scientific efforts required. (Published Online May 1 2007).

Neurophenomena such as central sensitisation, hyperalgesia and allodynia, speak of a brain that is anything but hardwired. The brain's ability to self-organise in staggeringly complex ways forces us to look beyond what turn out to be perceptions of a body-mind reference, ie the idea of a mind is more a story than an actuality. There are mounting criticisms of body-mind dualism, , but with poor understanding of what philosophical narrative can replace it. Clearly, our human condition and pain's unique (...) role in it, is much more unpredictable than we had hitherto thought. This unpredictability dictates that we at least attempt to advance the philosophical debate in the interests of the pain sufferer. Richard Hamilton will investigate other roads of pain from Spinoza to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. Richard, Horst Ruthrof and David Buchanan will look at how the theory of language has long contended its place beyond the body-mind problem. (shrink)

When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally. The physical parameters of the harm may not differ—your toe is flattened in both cases—but the psychological experience of pain is changed nonetheless. Intentional harms are premeditated by another person and have the specific purpose of causing pain. In a sense, intended harms are events initiated by one mind to communicate meaning (malice) to another, and this (...) could shape the recipient’s experience. This study examined whether self-reported pain is indeed higher when the events producing the pain are understood as intentionally (as opposed to unintentionally) caused by another person. Although pain was traditionally conceived to be solely physical in nature (Aydede, 2005), its experience varies substantially with psychological context. The placebo analgesia effect, for example, is the reduction of pain without a change in physical stimulation when context, expectations, or sugar pills challenge the interpretation of a sensation as painful (e.g., Fields, 2008). The nocebo effect, in turn, is the experience of pain without any physical stimulation—as when participants report headaches when told that a (nonexistent) electric current is passing through their heads (Schweiger & Parducci, 1981). These variations in pain experience seem to depend on the meaning of the stimulus: A sugar pill is meant to decrease pain, whereas electric current is meant to increase pain. In an interpersonal context, the meaning of an action is derived from the would complete. perceiver’s perceptions of the actor’s intention (Clark, 1996). (shrink)

Consider the following two sentences: (1) I see a dark discoloration in the back of my hand. (2) I feel a jabbing pain in the back of my hand. They seem to have the same surface grammar, and thus prima facie invite the same kind of semantic treatment. Even though a reading of see in (1) where the verb is not treated as a success verb is not out of the question, it is not the ordinary and natural reading. (...) Note that if I am hallucinating a dark discoloration in the back of my hand, then (1) is simply false. For (1) to be true, therefore, I have to stand in the seeing relation to a dark discoloration in the back of my hand, i.e., to a certain surface region in the back of my hand marked by a darker shade of the usual color of my skin, a certain region that can be seen by others possibly in the same way in which I see it. Also note that although the truth of (1) doesnt require the possession of any concept by me expressed by the words making up the sentence, my uttering of (1) to make a report typically does if we take such utterances as expressions of ones thoughts. So my seeing would typically induce me to identify something in the back of my hand as a dark discoloration. This is a typical case of categorization of something under a concept induced by perception. Of course, my uttering of (1) does more than attributing a physical property to a bodily region, it also reports that I am seeing it. (shrink)

One dimension of the controversy over whether evaluative properties are presented in perceptual content has general roots in the debate over whether perceptual content, in general, is rich or austere. I argue that we need to recognise a level of rich non-sensory perceptual content, drawing on experiences of chicken sexing and speech perception, to capture what our experience is like and our epistemic entitlements. In both cases (and many others), we are not conscious of the precise perceptual cues that are (...) the basis for discriminations and, thus, the characterisation of the phenomenal content of such experiences must go beyond sensory properties. Nevertheless, this point is arguably insufficient to establish the perception of evaluative properties. Their representation requires the subject to respond in certain ways. I discuss how this should go for the case of pain and then, in outline, for moral properties. (shrink)

This book shows that scientific explanations fall short of providing an exhaustive explanation of the dynamics of erotic perception. It furnishes portraits from Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Irigaray that help us understand the ethical, ontological, and religious dimensions of the pleasure, pain, hostility, shame, immodesty, tenderness, caring, and playfulness that compose erotic perception. The final portrait in the book portrays erotic perception as a challenge to existence. This portrait shows that the discernment of the other as sexually significant gives (...) rise to wonder, excitement, agitation, and trouble. The totality of existence is disturbed as we are faced with a decision about venturing to care for the other's existence. (shrink)

[Penultimate draft] I present the perceptualist/representationalist theories of pain in broad outline and critically examine them in light of a competing view according to which awareness of pain is essentially introspective. I end the essay with a positive sketch of a naturalistic proposal according to which pain experiences are intentional but not fully representational. This proposal makes sense of locating pains in body parts as well as taking pains as subjective experiences.

The experience of pain appears to be associated, from early infancy and across pain stimuli, with a consistent facial expression in humans. A social function is proposed for this: the communication of pain and the need for help to observers, to whom information about danger is of value, and who may provide help within a kin or cooperative relationship. Some commentators have asserted that the evidence is insufficient to account for the consistency of the face, as judged (...) by technical means or in the perceptions of observers, or that facial expression is epiphenomenal to a gross behavioural defensive response to pain. The major criticism is that it is unnecessary to invoke evolutionary mechanisms beyond the emergence of an unconditioned facial response to pain in neonates, subsequently shaped and maintained by instrumental and social reinforcement throughout life. These criticisms are addressed, acknowledging the need for further data to address some, and elaborating the areas in which evolutionary and operant mechanisms would predict different behavioural interactions, rather than acting synergistically. Several supportive commentaries propose extending evolutionarily-based hypotheses to sex differences, the complexities of others' responses within the social relationship, and the role of empathy. A number of commentators provided valuable suggestions for experimental paradigms or methodological issues. Overall, addressing these issues indicates the need for further conceptual development and for collection of data specifically in relation to these hypotheses. (shrink)

The author puts forward and defends a new argument for indirect realism called the argument from pain. The argument is akin to a well-known traditional argument to the same end, the argument from hallucination. Like the latter, it contains one premise stating an analogy between veridical perceptions and certain other states and one premise stating that those states are states of acquaintance with sense-data. The crucial difference is that the states that are said to be analogous to veridical perceptions (...) are pain-states instead of hallucinations. This difference makes the argument from pain immune to the standard objections against the argument from hallucination. (shrink)

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, (...) to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine. (shrink)

I argue that pain sensations are perceptual states, namely states that represent (actual or potential) damage. I defend this position against the objection that pains, unlike standard perceptual states, do not allow for an appearance-reality distinction by arguing that in the case of pain as well as in standard perceptual experiences, cognitive penetration or malfunctions of the underlying sensory systems can lead to a dissociation between the sensation on the one hand, and what is represented on the other (...) hand. Moreover, I refute the objection that the allegedly weak correlation between pain and bodily damage forces intentionalist accounts of pain to postulate so many malfunctions (misrepresentations respectively) that such accounts become implausible. I also rebut Murat Aydede’s objection that our linguistic practice supposedly shows that there is a conceptual difference between standard perceptual experiences and pain sensations by challenging Aydede’s premise that we always withdraw standard perceptual reports in case of counterevidence, while we never do that with pain reports. At the end, I propose an explanation as to why we do not express perceptual reports of (potential) bodily damage in objectivist, but in mental terms. (shrink)

Charles Travis’s new collection on perception brings together eleven of his previously published essays on this topic, some of which are substantially revised, plus one new essay. The intentionally ambiguous subtitle hints at the author’s endorsement of Fregean anti-psychologism, though influences from Wittgenstein and Austin are equally apparent. The work centres around two major questions in the philosophy of mind and perception. First, Travis argues against the view that perceptual experience, as distinct from perceptual judgement or belief, is representational, and (...) so belongs to what Travis calls ‘the conceptual’. This is contrasted with the ‘non-conceptual’, or ‘historical’; that is, environmental particulars which lack the generality of representational thought. The second is what Travis calls ‘the fundamental question of perception’; namely, how can perceptual experience make the world bear (rationally) upon what we are to think and do? The answer, he argues, cannot be found in terms of relations between thoughts—a purely conceptual affair—but in the way that thought is itself grounded in the particularity of experience. For perceptual experience to bear rationally upon thought at all—or, in more familiar Fregean terms, to bring ‘objects’ under ‘concepts’—perception must first make environmental particulars available to cognition. Thus, Travis argues, experience cannot itself be ‘conceptual’, or representational, on pain of undermining the very thing that grants us a recognisable, and so thinkable, world at all. (shrink)

Unlike many books of its kind, this collection of essays is more than a mere aggregate of papers loosely ordered around a set of common themes. In fact, for a work sensitive to the values inherent in the analytical tradition, it is surprisingly systematic, and strikes a happy balance between the products of the system-builders and the deliverances of those who are content to give us merely isolated insights. It embodies a sound knowledge of the history of philosophy, a sensitivity (...) to the contributions of the British philosophers since Bradley, and a desire to take science seriously without succumbing to the reductionism which so often characterized the contributions of the positivists. Throughout the papers the influence of Carnap, Kant and Wittgenstein is especially evident; and perhaps most characteristic are the repeated attempts to tread carefully, with their help, the sometimes narrow lines dividing realist and phenomenalist, realist and idealist, and realist and nominalist. Sellars is at pains to incorporate in his system the partial truths which always characterize conflicting philosophical alternatives. This book is well worth careful, critical study by philosophers of all persuasions.--C. V. (shrink)

The topic of pain and suffering is complex and requires a holistic vision. This article begins by clarifying concepts to understand pain as a biological, psychological, and social phenomenon that has an evolutionary history whose maximum expression arises in humans. Established this common ground, it explores altruism and animal cooperation as incipient phenomena of care for the other, though contextual. Then it points out that the difference with humans is that they perceive caring for the weak, innocent, and (...) marginalized as a moral duty and a path of personal flourishing. Finally, in the face of human weakness and from Christian theology, God shows with deeds a path of care for the weak by making himself weak, suffering and remaining innocent. (shrink)

abstract: Anaxagoras is notorious for his view that every perception is accompanied by pain but that not all concurrent pains are distinctly felt by the perceiving subject. This thesis is reported and criticized by Aristotle's heir Theophrastus in his De Sensibus. Traditionally, scholars believe that Theophrastus rejects Anaxagoras's thesis of the ubiquity of pain as counterintuitive, with the appeal to unfelt pain looking like a desperate category mistake given that pain is nothing but a feeling. Contra (...) the traditional view, this paper argues that Theophrastus neither aims to defend ordinary phenomenology nor is bothered by the concept of unfelt pain; instead, he develops a series of new Aristotelian arguments to defend a controversial, optimistic picture about the distribution of affective qualities in animal life. More than a supplement to Aristotle's psychology, his engagement with Anaxagoras reveals an important yet often ignored ethical concern behind the Peripatetic philosophy of perception. (shrink)

Based largely on the so-called problem of “asymmetry in concept application”, philosopher Murat Aydede has argued for a non-perceptual view of pain. Aydede is of course not denying basic neurobiological facts about neurons, action potentials, and the like, but he nonetheless makes a strong philosophical case for pain not being the perception of something extramental. In the present paper, after having stated some of the presuppositions I hold as a physician and pain researcher, and after having shortly (...) described Aydede’s critique of perceptual theories of pain, I make a constructive proposal centred around the concept of pain as the perception of some-one, not some-thing. In doing so, I propose that there often is a problematic duality at work when we think about pain, namely the mental/extramental duality. This pre-reflective mindset creates difficulties when reflecting over pain. Instead, I propose the body/world duality as being more helpful. Two neologisms, cosmoception and egoception, are presented as an alternative to the twin concepts of exteroception and interoception. It is argued that the new concepts have the advantage of not pushing our thought into a mental/extra-mental dichotomy. Hence, when in pain, I get epistemic access to the body that is I, to how I fare in this world. From that perspective, pain is not the perception of something, but of someone–namely, the self. In the final part of the paper, this proposal is discussed in dialogue with a paper from phenomenological thinker Jennifer Bullington. (shrink)

The ArgumentPain has important biomedical socioanthropological, semiotic, and other facets. In this contribution pain and the experssion of pain are looked at from the perspective of evolutionary biology, utilizing, among others, cross-cultural data from field work in Melanesia.No other being cares for sick and suffering conspecifics in the way humans do. Notwithstanding aggression and neglect, common in all cultures, human societies can be characterized as empathic, comforting, and promoting the health and well-being of their members. One important stimulus (...) triggering this caring response in others is the expression of pain. The nonverbal channel of communication, particularly certain universal — i.e., culture-independent facial expressions, gestures, and body postures, convey much of the message from the painstricken person to the group.These behaviors signal the person's physical and psychical pain, sadness, grief, and despair in ways very similar to the signs given by infants and small children: the body loses tonus and sinks or drops to the ground, the gestures are those of helplessness. Pain and grief may be so strong that control is lost not only over the body's posture but also over the mind's awareness. In such cases the afflicted person may carry out actions endangering himself or others. In general, these behavior patterns resemble those of infants in situations of distress and danger, and it is not surprising that the response of the members of the group is basically parental: taking care, assisting and consoling.Perceptive and behavioral patterns which developed in the course of avian and mammalian phylogeny to serve the well-being of the young have proven, as was shown by Eibl-Eibesfeldt, to be powerful building blocks for actions in other spheres of human interaction. Love is one such field, the reactions to a conspecific suffering pain is another. (shrink)

One of the most promising trends both in the neuroscience of pain and in psychiatric treatments of chronic pain is the focus on mental imagery. My aim is to argue that if we take these findings seriously, we can draw very important and radical philosophical conclusions. I argue that what we pretheoretically take to be pain is partly constituted by sensory stimulation-driven pain processing and partly constituted by mental imagery. This general picture can explain some problematic (...) cases of pain perception, for example, phantom-limb pain, and it also has important consequences for some recent philosophical debates about the nature and content of pain. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Perception is one of the most pervasive and puzzling problems in philosophy, generating a great deal of attention and controversy in philosophy of mind, psychology and metaphysics. If perceptual illusion and hallucination are possible, how can perception be what it intuitively seems to be, a direct and immediate access to reality? How can perception be both internally dependent and externally directed? Perception is an outstanding introduction to this fundamental topic, covering both the perennial and recent work on the problem. Adam (...) Pautz examines four of the most important theories of perception: the sense datum view; the internal physical state view; the representational view; and naïve realism, assessing each in turn. He also discusses the relationship between perception and the physical world and the issue of whether reality is as it appears. Useful examples are included throughout the book to illustrate the puzzles of perception, including hallucinations, illusions, the laws of appearance, blindsight, and neuroscientific explanations of our experience of pain, smell and color. The book covers both traditional philosophical arguments and more recent empirical arguments deriving from research in psychophysics and neuroscience. The addition of chapter summaries, suggestions for further reading and a glossary of terms make Perception essential reading for anyone studying the topic in detail, as well as for students of philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Table of Contents: Olivier Massin, 'Pleasure and Its Contraries'; Colin Klein, 'The Penumbral Theory of Masochistic Pleasure'; Siri Leknes and Brock Bastian, 'The Benefits of Pain'; Valerie Gray Hardcastle, 'Pleasure Gone Awry? A New Conceptualization of Chronic Pain and Addiction'; Richard Gray, 'Pain, Perception and the Sensory Modalities: Revisiting the Intensive Theory'; Jonathan Cohen and Matthew Fulkerson, Affect, Rationalization, and Motivation; Murat Aydede, 'How to Unify Theories of Sensory Pleasure: An Adverbialist Proposal'; Adam Shriver, 'The Asymmetrical Contributions (...) of Pleasure and Pain to Subjective Well-Being'. (shrink)

Pain has not only sensory, but also emotional and cognitive, components. Some studies have explored the effect of pain on time perception, but the results remain controversial. Whether individual pain-related emotional and cognitive factors play roles in this process should also be explored. In this study, we investigated the effect of electrical stimulation–induced pain on interval timing using a temporal bisection task. During each task session, subjects received one of five types of stimulation randomly: no stimulus (...) and 100 and 300 ms of non-painful and painful stimulation. Pain-related emotional and cognitive factors were measured using a series of questionnaires. The proportion of “long” judgments of a 1,200-ms visual stimulus duration was significantly smaller with 300 ms painful stimulation than with no stimulus and 100 ms and 300 ms non-painful stimulation. The point of subjective equality did not differ among sessions, but the average Weber fraction was higher for painful sessions than for no-stimulus session. The pain fear score correlated positively with the PSE under 100 ms non-painful and painful and 300 ms painful stimulation. Pain catastrophizing and pain anxiety scores correlated significantly with the WF under no stimulus and 100 ms non-painful stimulation, respectively. These results suggest that electrical stimulation–induced pain affects temporal sensitivity, and that pain-related emotional and cognitive factors are associated with the processing of time perception. (shrink)

Chronic pain affects a large part of the population causing functional disability, being often associated with coexisting psychological disorders, such as depression and anxiety, besides cognitive deficits, and sleep disturbance. The world elderly population has been growing over the last decades and the negative consequences of chronic pain for these individuals represent a current clinical challenge. The main painful complaints in the elderly are related to neurodegenerative and musculoskeletal conditions, peripheral vascular diseases, arthritis, and osteoarthritis, contributing toward poorly (...) life quality, social isolation, impaired physical activity, and dependence to carry out daily activities. Organ dysfunction and other existing diseases can significantly affect the perception and responses to chronic pain in this group. It has been proposed that elderly people have an altered pain experience, with changes in pain processing mechanisms, which might be associated with the degeneration of circuits that modulate the descending inhibitory pathways of pain. Aging has also been linked to an increase in the pain threshold, a decline of painful sensations, and a decrease in pain tolerance. Still, elderly patients with chronic pain show an increased risk for dementia and cognitive impairment. The present review article is aimed to provide the state-of-art of pre-clinical and clinical research about chronic pain in elderly, emphasizing the altered mechanisms, comorbidities, challenges, and potential therapeutic alternatives. (shrink)