Vigilance to pain makes persons experts in facial recognition of pain
Schneider, R.1, Baum, C.1, Rainville, P.2, and Lautenbacher, L.1
1Physiologische Psycholgie, Universität Bamberg; 2Department de Stomatologie,Université de Montréal
Vigilance to pain (PVAQ), pain catastrophizing (PCS) and fear of pain (FPQ III) are attentional and affective moderators of processing pain-related information. To understand whether and to what extent they predict recognition of pain faces, forty healthy participants (20 females) had to recognize in a forced choice task painful and angry faces. Happy and neutral faces were used as filler items. All stimuli were extracted from the Montréal Pain and Affective Face Clips. Additionally, participants rated the certainty of their choices. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that only vigilance to pain explained a significant amount of the variance in sensitivity for pain faces. No concept contributed significantly to the prediction of choice-certainty.
Pain-vigilant individuals have shown to be superior in recognition of pain faces. They appear competent in detecting social indicators of threatening or harmful situations.