Sting Of Intentional Pain Summary

The psychological processes in the article include pain perception, and how we as humans perceive pain, how we react to it, and how we adapt to it. The article explains the pain signaling process and how pain can be amplified. For example, when we get pricked by a needle, a signal from our finger ascends through the spinal cord to reach parts of the brain. From there, we perceive pain, then we form a pain experience. Pain perception can be resulting from several factors such as the frequency of pain input, how sensitive the CNS is, How the body reacts after brain perceives and tries to send information to the injured area. A pain experience is when we have the urge to put a band aid on our injury, or be scared to get pricked from a needle again. However, each pain experience differs from one culture to the other, moreover, one person to the other. The article is conducting a research paper about pain and pain perception in different ethnic groups.

Pain is not only defined as a sensation or a physical awareness, but also entails perception. Moreover, pain is an unpleasant and an uncomfortable emotion that is transferred to the brain by sensory neurons. There are various kinds of pain and how one perceives them is varied as well. Certain parts of the brain also play a key role in how one feels pain such as the parietal lobe, which is involved in interpreting pain while the hypothalamus is responsible for the response to pain one has. Although some believe pain is just a physical awareness and is in the body, pain is all in one’s mind because the perception of pain and the emotion that controls its intensity differs in individuals and when pain itself is administered to the body, the brain determines the emotions one attaches to each painful experience.

With each wrong answer came an electric shock that the teacher, a random male participant, had to physically cause. The teacher could hear the learner after a while begging to stop. At this point the teachers causing the pain are obviously uncomfortable. Some start by laughing nervously and other just immediately beg to stop the experiment. At this point the experimenter gives a series of orders to push the teacher to continue. As a result, two-thirds of participants carried on shocking the learner to the highest level of four hundred and fifty volts. All the participants involved continued up to three hundred

In Diane Ackerman’s essay “Pain,” she ponders about the subjectivity in experiencing pain, how to define pain, and its role in human life. She begins by emphasizing that an individual’s ability to endure pain may depend more on culture and atmosphere than on the actual magnitude of the pain. Given that at times humans can forego pain for a spell because of their atmosphere, Ackerman elucidates the importance of surroundings in how one experiences pain by exemplifying her claim through a phenomenon in football players. Ackerman continues her discussion on the disparities in the reception of pain by asserting expectations delineate the painfulness of events. Strengthening her claim that tradition affects pain, Ackerman considers how cultures

Pain not only involves the physical reaction to damaged tissue, but also involves an emotional and cognitive response by the person experiencing the pain (Backer, 1994). A person's prior experience will influence how pain is managed. Pain is a signal that something is not

To most people, pain is a nuisance, but to others pain controls their life. The feeling discomforts us in ways that can sometimes seem almost imaginable. These feelings can lead to many different side effects if not dealt with or diagnosed. These effects can include depression, anxiety, and incredible amount of stress. The truth about pain is that it is vital to our existence. Without the nervous system responding to pain, we would have no idea if we were touching a hot stove, being stuck by a porcupine’s needles, or something else that could leave a lasting effect upon our bodies without us even knowing anything about it.

To most people, pain is a nuisance. But to others, pain controls their life. The feeling discomforts us in ways that can sometimes seem almost imaginable. These feelings can lead to many different side effects if not dealt with or diagnosed. These effects can include depression, anxiety, and incredible amounts of stress. The truth about pain is that it is vital to our existence. Without the nervous system responding to pain, we would have no idea if we were touching a hot stove, being stuck by a porcupine's needles, or something else that could leave a lasting effect upon our bodies without us even knowing anything about it. This warning system helps to alert us when there is

The subjects of the experiment believed that they were taking part in a study on the relationship of learning and punishment. The subject would sit in a room and ask questions to an actor in another room, who was supposed to be another subject. In front of the questioner was a box that had a series of buttons labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts. The subject was told to shock the person every time they answered incorrectly, increasing the voltage each time. As the shocks got worse, the actor would make noise, bang on the wall, yell for help, etc. but the researcher would tell the subject to keep going. Milgrim found, contrary to many psychologists predictions, that sixty-five percent of the subjects delivered the shocks all the way up to 450 volts (Slater).

Pain perception can be less than might be expected from the extent of a physical injury. This was proven by a scientist called Susana Bantick, Oxford University, and colleagues who carried out a study on the influence of attention distracting pain processing (Bantick et al, 2002). During the experiment, brain processing was measured by measuring brain activity using fMRI. Participants rated pain from 1-10 when noxious heat stimulus was applied to their hand in the scanner. She then followed the same process but gave them a task which required cognitive processing; reducing the amount of focused attention on pain. Bantick, therefore, showed attention distraction can reduce the amount of pain perceived by the individual, also pain processing to the brain was reduced. This provides vital evidence that pain perception does not just depend on the injury alone.

where there would be a teacher and a subject on two opposing sides of a wall. Whenever the subject made an incorrect answer, they would receive a shock, this experiment was rigged so that the subject would actually be shocked be rather made extremely convincing screams of pain and the subject was told to give the wrong answer to the teacher. When the voltage reached passed 200 v, the teacher would become more reluctant to go further with the experiment due to the pain that the subject was going through, but the teacher didn’t know that the test was rigged. After it got past 475 V, about 65% of the teachers would hold the switch to shock the subject under the pressure from the men in the white coats recording the experiment and in most cases were reluctant to press on the button by themselves. This experiment no only proves that many people will do dangerous and immoral things under the pressure of authority, but also supports the idea that many people would not commit these acts underneath their own free will due to human

The experimenter would show the participant along with a confederate a shock generator with voltages of 15v to 450v (30 switches in 15v increments). Participants were told this was connected to a chair in another room. They then drew lots to decide who would be the “teacher” in charge of shocks and who the “learner” receiving shocks (the outcome was rigged for the participant to be the teacher). The confederate was then strapped into the chair, and the participant was given a sample shock of 45v from the generator (the only real shocks given during the experiment) and the experiment would begin. Word pairs were read out which the teacher would ask questions on through an intercom. Wrong answers received a shock which increased with each incorrect response. If the participant reached 450v they would repeat that level twice before the experiment was concluded. Any questioning or refusal to continue was met with standard answers from the experimenter such as “although the shocks are painful, there is no permanent tissue damage” or “the experiment requires that you continue”.

‘Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage’ (International association for the study of pain 2014). Pain can be made up of complex and subjective experiences. The experience of pain is highly personal and private, and can not be directly observed or measured from one person to the next (Mac Lellan 2006). According to the agency for health care policy and research 1992, an individuals self-report of pain is the most reliable indicator of its presence. This is also supported by Mc Caffery’s definition in 1972, when he said ‘Pain is whatever the experiencing patient says it is, existing whenever he says it does’.

To authenticate the potential electrical intensity to the learner the teacher is sampled with a 45-volt shock to the wrist. The teacher is then instructed to administer an incrementally increasing punishing electrical shock for each incorrect answer. This follows several methods to inform the teacher of the potential impact of the electrical shock that they will administer. These included, warnings listing the voltage range of 15 to 450-volts labeled Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger Severe Shock, and XXX, bright red

The International Association for the Study of Pain defined pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (Unk, 2007). Pain being described such as this allows us to see that pain is a perception, not unlike seeing or hearing. Pain is the most common reason that people seek medical attention but pain is very hard to define because it is subjective. Pain perception is the process by which a painful stimulus is relayed from the site of stimulation to the central nervous system (Freudenrich, 2008). In order to determine if pain is a perception of the mind or if it is biological we must first understand how the process of pain works.

The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage” (1979). Pain is actually the culprit behind warranting a visit to a physician office for many people (Besson, 1999). Notoriously unpleasant, pain could also pose a threat as both a psychological and economic burden (Phillips, 2006). Sometimes pain does happen without any damage of tissue or any likely diseased state. The reasons for such pain are poorly understood and the term used to describe such type of pain is “psychogenic pain”. Also, the loss of productivity and daily activity due to pain is also significant. Pain engulfs a trillion dollars of GDP for lost work time and disability payments (Melnikova, 2010). Untreated pain not only impacts a person suffering from pain but also impacts their whole family. A person’s quality of life is negatively impacted by pain and it diminishes their ability to concentrate, work, exercise, socialize, perform daily routines, and sleep. All of these negative impacts ultimately lead to much more severe behavioral effects such as depression, aggression, mood alterations, isolation, and loss of self-esteem, which pose a great threat to human society.