Neuroscience
You've got a painful visit to the dentist lined up and what do people advise you to do once you're there? Try to think of something nice, they always say. Imagine yourself lying on a lovely sandy beach. Not only can such advice be annoying, new research suggests it's also ineffective. You're much better off accepting the pain when it comes along and dealing with it.
That's according to Jenny McMullen and colleagues who tested the ability of student participants to cope with unpleasant electric shocks of increasing duration. The students were tested before and after receiving tuition in distraction or acceptance techniques.
To learn distraction, the students were asked to imagine how the first round of electric shocks had felt and to distract themselves from these feelings by imagining a pleasant scene. They were also asked to imagine that continuing with the electric shocks in the next part of the experiment was akin to crossing a swamp, and that the best way to get across was to think of pleasant images.
By contrast, the students taught acceptance were told to walk around the room, repeating to themselves 'I cannot walk'. The idea was to teach them that there is a disconnect between what they say to themselves - their thoughts - and what they actually do; that it is possible to continue enduring pain despite the thought that it is getting more uncomfortable. These students were also told to imagine the swamp metaphor, but in their version, the best way to get across was just to notice any unpleasant thoughts and feelings and carry them with them.
Only the acceptance training was effective. In the second round of testing, the students taught acceptance were able to endure more electric shocks than they had in the first part of the experiment, but crucially, no such difference was observed for the students taught distraction.
Moreover, other students taught distraction or acceptance based only on very brief instruction, without use of metaphor or exercises, also showed no greater capacity to endure shocks.
"Of course, the current findings are restricted to a relatively artificial pain-induction task and a relatively small, non-clinical sample [16 people per condition], but the results do call for a careful and systematic analysis of how exercises and metaphors work in future analogue research," the researchers said.
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MCMULLEN, J., BARNESHOLMES, D., BARNESHOLMES, Y., STEWART, I., LUCIANO, C., COCHRANE, A. (2008). Acceptance versus distraction: Brief instructions, metaphors and exercises in increasing tolerance for self-delivered electric shocks. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(1), 122-129. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2007.09.002
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Acceptance, not distraction, is the way to deal with pain
You've got a painful visit to the dentist lined up and what do people advise you to do once you're there? Try to think of something nice, they always say. Imagine yourself lying on a lovely sandy beach. Not only can such advice be annoying, new research suggests it's also ineffective. You're much better off accepting the pain when it comes along and dealing with it.That's according to Jenny McMullen and colleagues who tested the ability of student participants to cope with unpleasant electric shocks of increasing duration. The students were tested before and after receiving tuition in distraction or acceptance techniques.
To learn distraction, the students were asked to imagine how the first round of electric shocks had felt and to distract themselves from these feelings by imagining a pleasant scene. They were also asked to imagine that continuing with the electric shocks in the next part of the experiment was akin to crossing a swamp, and that the best way to get across was to think of pleasant images.
By contrast, the students taught acceptance were told to walk around the room, repeating to themselves 'I cannot walk'. The idea was to teach them that there is a disconnect between what they say to themselves - their thoughts - and what they actually do; that it is possible to continue enduring pain despite the thought that it is getting more uncomfortable. These students were also told to imagine the swamp metaphor, but in their version, the best way to get across was just to notice any unpleasant thoughts and feelings and carry them with them.
Only the acceptance training was effective. In the second round of testing, the students taught acceptance were able to endure more electric shocks than they had in the first part of the experiment, but crucially, no such difference was observed for the students taught distraction.
Moreover, other students taught distraction or acceptance based only on very brief instruction, without use of metaphor or exercises, also showed no greater capacity to endure shocks.
"Of course, the current findings are restricted to a relatively artificial pain-induction task and a relatively small, non-clinical sample [16 people per condition], but the results do call for a careful and systematic analysis of how exercises and metaphors work in future analogue research," the researchers said.
_________________________________
MCMULLEN, J., BARNESHOLMES, D., BARNESHOLMES, Y., STEWART, I., LUCIANO, C., COCHRANE, A. (2008). Acceptance versus distraction: Brief instructions, metaphors and exercises in increasing tolerance for self-delivered electric shocks. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(1), 122-129. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2007.09.002
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Interpretations
The recent Science article Neurobiological Substrates of Dread, Berns et al. (2006) has drawn a lot of interest. In the mainstream media many similar dry and simplified accounts are propogating, but the blogosphere has some great analysis. Three unique...
- Is Monotony Worse Than Melancholy? Participants Gave Themselves Electric Shocks When Bored, Not When Sad
To psychologists, there's nothing boring about boredom. Among other things, they're beginning to realise just what an especially aversive state it is to be in. A new study in Psychiatry Research brings this home – the researchers found that...
- Cope With Pain By Changing How You Picture It
Most people who suffer from serious pain have one or more mental images that they associate with the discomfort and what it represents to them. A new study by Clare Philips and Debbie Samsom has shown that these pain-sufferers can be taught to re-imagine...
- Classic 1960's Obediency Experiment Reproduced In Virtual Reality
Scientists have recreated Milgram’s classic obediency psychology experiment using virtual reality. Back in the 1960s Stanley Milgram appeared to show that student participants would obey a researcher and administer lethal electric shocks to a stranger,...
- The Dread Zone
I encountered this research about the neurobiology of dread twice recently — in the New York Times and on Science Friday (mp3). Science Friday interviewed Gregory Berns (professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory), who used fMRI to determine...