The Social Pain Posit

Although discussion of social pain has become popular among researchers in psychology and behavioural neuroscience, the philosophical community has yet to pay it any direct attention. Social pain is characterized as the emotional reaction to the perception of the loss or devaluation of desired relationships. These are argued to comprise a pain type and are explicitly intended to include the everyday sub-types grief, jealousy, heartbreak, rejection, and hurt feelings. Social pain is accordingly posited as a nested type of pain encompassing multiple emotional sub-types. Call this the social pain posit. This article focuses on whether we should endorse the social pain posit and, in particular, whether social pain is pain. I present the four lines of evidence for the social pain posit that are currently offered in the literature and I argue that each provides only inadequate support, taken either individually or together. I close by considering the significance of the presented argument for philosophical theorizing about the nature and the moral significance of affective experiences in particular and mental taxonomizing more generally.     

Comment on “The Self‐Care of Psychologists and Mental Health Professionals” (Dattilio, 2015)—Working With the Mentally Ill Is a Mental Health Hazard: What Can We Do About It?

It has been known for many decades that the risk of burnout, psychological distress, mental illness, or suicidal ideation is higher in mental health professionals (MHP) compared with many other professions and the general population; however, MHPs often disregard their own mental health for the sake of helping others, sometimes with fatal consequences. Paradoxically MHP tends to avoid seeking professional help for their own mental health issues. Apart from the serious risk to one's health that this poses, MHPs are now mandated to report any impairment that affects their ability to practice. The aim of this commentary is to emphasise the heightened risk of mental illness among MHP, and includes some risk factors associated with burnout, psychological distress, or mental illness in MHP. It explores some of the barriers to help seeking, including stigma, and highlights mindfulness as a self‐care strategy to prevent psychological distress and burnout. The commentary makes recommendations for inclusions into current psychology postgraduate as well as undergraduate curriculum. It concludes with recommendation for suitable support from professional bodies to help maintain good mental health and to help prevent mental illness among MHPs.     

Pain and Bodily Care: Whose Body Matters?

Pain is unpleasant. It is something that one avoids as much as possible. One might then claim that one wants to avoid pain because one cares about one's body. On this view, individuals who do not experience pain as unpleasant and to be avoided, like patients with pain asymbolia, do not care about their body. This conception of pain has been recently defended by Bain [2014 Bain, D. 2014. Pains That Don't Hurt, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 92/2: 305–20.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] and Klein [forthcoming Klein, C. forthcoming. What Pain Asymbolia Really Shows, Mind. [Google Scholar]]. In their view, one needs to care about one's body for pain to have motivational force. But does one need to care about one's body qua one's own? Or does one merely need to care about the body that happens to be one's own? In this paper, I will consider various interpretations of the notion of bodily care, in light of a series of pathological cases in which patients report pain in a body part that they do not experience as their own. These cases are problematic if one adopts a first-personal interpretation of bodily care, according to which pain requires one to care about what is represented as one's own body. The objection can run as follows. If the patients experience the body part as alien, then they should not care about it. Therefore, they should be similar to patients with pain asymbolia. But they are not. Hence, bodily care is not necessary to pain. To resist this conclusion, one can try to revise the interpretation of the notion of bodily care and to offer alternative interpretations that are not first-personal. However, I will show that that those alternatives also fail to account for these borderline cases of pain.     

Coping Styles,Pain Expressiveness,and Implicit Theories of Chronic Pain

Whereas some individuals use active coping strategies and are able to adaptively cope with their pain, others use passive strategies and catastrophic appraisals, which are often associated with increased displays of pain behavior and negative pain-related outcomes. To investigate attribution-based implicit theories as a potential underlying mechanism that might affect coping success, we hypothesized that pain patients with an incremental implicit theory of pain (i.e., view pain as malleable) would have more active coping strategies, lower levels of pain expressiveness, and better pain-related outcomes than those with an entity implicit theory of pain (i.e., view pain as nonmalleable). Patients with chronic back pain undergoing a functional assessment completed a variety of self-report measures and participated in a pain-inducing physiotherapy procedure. The results revealed those with an incremental theory of pain used more active coping strategies, displayed less pain behavior, and reported better pain-related outcomes (e.g., lower levels of depression) than individuals with an entity theory of pain. The findings suggest implicit theories of pain may represent an underlying social-cognitive mechanism linked to important coping, emotional, and expressive reactions to chronic pain. Identifying such a mechanism may provide valuable information for the assessment and treatment of chronic pain.     

Is the Effect of Behavioral Synchrony on Cooperative Behavior Mediated by Pain Threshold?

Synchronized behavior results in a variety of prosocial behaviors. Research has also implicated that interpersonal synchrony affects pain thresholds, inferred as indicative of endorphin levels. The current study was designed to see if these pain threshold effects mediated the effect of synchrony on interpersonal cooperation. Twenty six individuals were randomly assigned to complete a 30 minute run on a treadmill in either a synchronized or nonsynchronized condition. Pain threshold was measured both before and after exercise as an indicator of endorphin activity. A postrun social investment game measured interpersonal cooperation. Analyses showed that there was a significant direct relationship between condition and cooperation but that this effect was not mediated by pain threshold.     

Modulation of motor variability related to experimental muscle pain during elbow-flexion contractions

Experimental muscle pain typically reorganizes the motor control. The pain effects may decrease when the three-dimensional force components are voluntarily adjusted, but it is not known if this could have negative consequences on other structures of the motor system. The present study assessed the effects of acute pain on the force variability during sustained elbow flexion when controlling task-related (one-dimensional) and all (three-dimensional) contraction force components via visual feedback. Experimental muscle pain was induced by bolus injection of hypertonic saline into m. biceps brachii, and isotonic saline was used as control. Twelve subjects performed sustained elbow flexion at different levels of the maximal voluntary contraction (5–30% MVC) before, during, and after the injections. Three-dimensional force components were measured simultaneously with surface electromyography (EMG) from elbow flexors and auxiliary muscles. Results showed that force variability was increased during pain compared to baseline for contractions using one-dimensional feedback (P < .05), but no significant differences were found for three-dimensional feedback. During painful contractions (1) EMG activity from m. trapezius was increased during contractions using both one-dimensional and three-dimensional feedback (P < .05), and (2) the complexity of EMG from m. triceps brachii and m. deltoid was higher for the three-dimensional feedback (P < .05). In conclusion, the three-dimensional feedback reduced the pain-related functional distortion at the cost of a more complex control of synergistic muscles.     

Reorganised motor control strategies of trunk muscles due to acute low back pain

This study assessed how the low back motor control strategies were affected by experimental pain. In twelve volunteers the right m. longissimus was injected by hypertonic and isotonic (control) saline. The pain intensity was assessed on a visual analog scale (VAS). Subjects were seated on a custom-designed chair including a 3-dimensional force sensor adjusted to the segmental height of T1. Electromyography (EMG) was recorded bilaterally from longissimus, multifidus, rectus abdominis, and external oblique muscles. Isometric trunk extensions were performed before, during, and after the saline injections at 5%, 10%, and 20% of maximum voluntary contraction force. Visual feedback of the extension force was provided whereas the tangential force components were recorded. Compared with isotonic saline, VAS scores were higher following hypertonic saline injections (P < .01). Experimental low back pain reduced the EMG activity bilaterally of the rectus abdominis muscles during contractions at 10% and 20% MVC (P < .01) although force accuracy and tangential force variability was not affected. Increased variability in the tangential force composition was found during pain compared with the non-painful condition (P < .05). The immediate adaptation to pain was sufficient to maintain the quality of the task performance; however the long-term consequence of such adaptation is unknown and may overload other structures.     

心理定势现象的认知神经机制

问题解决活动中的心理定势,是指人们固执地沿用熟悉方案、忽略其他方案的反应倾向。它可能源于人们已经掌握的陈述性知识,也可能源于程序性知识,两类不同来源的心理定势的发生条件和影响效果都不尽相同。然而,过往的研究都没有做出严格区分。本文通过梳理相关研究,描述心理定势现象,解释心理定势是怎么发生的,分析心理定势是在什么条件下发生的、会对心理与行为活动造成什么样的影响,从而评述两种来源的心理定势的认知神经机制,指出尚未解决的科学问题。     

输入型脑机接口技术临床应用的法律规制研究

输入型脑机接口技术的临床应用为神经和精神类疾病患者带来健康福祉。然而该技术涉及对大脑神经元活动的影响与改变,产生新的法律问题,尚未引起立法的重视。立法滞后的根源是对精神领域保护的忽视、对技术不确定性双重面向的忽视,以及大脑信息特殊性的忽视。对此,应当确立精神完整法益的立法保护;完善输入型脑机接口技术临床应用过程中的知情同意;对大脑信息进行特殊保护。从而保护患者的自我决定权、精神完整性、隐私权,实现患者最佳利益。