Stability of Pain Measures in a Different Stimuli Context

Pain in any context is always associated with high interand intra-individual variability. There are several paininducement methods and numerous pain measurement methods at researchers’ disposal in experimental settings; since none of them is without limitations, the increasing number of researchers decides upon a multimethod approach. In doing so, clarity and unambiguity of the results may vary – depending on the reliability of the certain method in a specific stimuli context. The aim of this study was to explore the stability of the pain perception in the same subject sample between different pain contexts and also within the same one. 52 female students participated in three methodologically identical repeated measurements, conducted a week apart. The pain was experimentally induced in two different ways – first by thermal and then by electrical stimuli. Participants reported on pain threshold and tolerance during stimulation and assessed pain intensity and unpleasantness right after each stimulation. Results demonstrated that the stability of pain perception depends on both the stimuli context and the type of pain measurement. Pain experience was proven to be more stable in thermal-stimuli context, where pain threshold and tolerance remained unchanged in all repeated measurements. In electrical-stimuli context pain threshold and tolerance successively increased with each following measurement. In both pain modalities, the assessment of the pain unpleasantness increased with each measurement, while the assessment of the pain intensity remained unchanged. Observed contextual differences could be due to different familiarity with specific pain stimuli context and different level of anxiety associated with it.