Do Emotional States Influence Physiological Pain Responses?

Pain is a highly subjective and complex phenomenon. Current methods used to measure pain mostly rely on the patient’s description, which may not always be possible. This way, pain recognition systems based on body language and physiological signals have emerged. As the emotional state of a person can also influence the way pain is perceived, in this work, a protocol for pain induction with previous emotional elicitation was conducted. Eletrocardiogram (ECG), Electrodermal Activity (EDA) and Eletromyogram (EMG) signals were collected during the protocol. Besides the physiological responses, perception was also assessed through reported-scores (using a numeric scale) and times for pain tolerance. In this protocol, 3 different emotional elicitation sessions, negative, positive and neutral, were performed through videos of excerpts of terror, comedy and documentary movies, respectively, and pain was induced using the Cold Pressor Task (CPT). A total of 56 participants performed the study (with 54 completing all three sessions). The results showed that during the negative emotional state, pain reported-scores were higher and pain threshold and tolerance times were smaller when compared with positive. As expected, the physiological response to pain remain similar despite the emotional elicitation.