Mancini, F. and Longo, Matthew R. and Kammers, M.P.M. and Haggard, P. (2011) Visual distortion of body size modulates pain perception. Psychological Science 22 (3), pp. 325-330. ISSN 0956-7976.
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Text (Refereed)
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Abstract
Pain is a complex subjective experience, that can be shaped by several cognitive, psychological and even contextual variables. For example, simply viewing the body reduces the reported intensity of acute physical pain. We investigated whether this visually induced analgesia can be modulated by the visually depicted size of the stimulated body part. We measured contact heat-pain thresholds, while participants viewed either their own hand or a neutral object, at real size, enlarged, or reduced. Vision of the body was analgesic, increasing heat-pain thresholds by ~ 4°C. Importantly, enlargement of the viewed hand enhanced this analgesia, while looking at a reduced hand decreased it. These results demonstrate that visual distortions of body size modulate sensory components of pain, and reveal a clear functional relation between the perception of pain and the representation of the body.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | 12 month embargo from date of publication |
| Keyword(s) / Subject(s): | somatosensory perception, pain, body representation, multisensory integration, vision, analgesia |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences |
| Research Centres and Institutes: | Brain and Cognitive Development, Centre for (CBCD) |
| Depositing User: | Matthew Longo |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jan 2012 10:32 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 16:57 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/4532 |
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