Pain threshold – Measure of pain sensitivity or social behavior?4

The aim was to examine the effect of the experimenter’s social status and its interaction with participant’s gender on pressure pain threshold. Both male and female students participated in the study (N = 96) and were evenly assigned into two groups which differed only in the professional status of the experimenter who was a professor (higher status) in one group and a student (lower status) in the other. The factorial ANOVA revealed statistically significant and large main effects of the experimenter’s status and the participants’ gender, indicating higher pain thresholds in male participants and in the higher status experimenter group. Although both males and females had higher pain thresholds when measured by a higher status experimenter, a statistically significant interaction revealed that status affected male participants more so than females. The obtained results are probably due to social behaviour, emphasizing relevance of the experimenter’s and participants’ characteristics in pain measurement.