Social discounting of pain

Impatience can be formalized as a delay discount rate, describing how the subjective value of reward decreases as it is delayed. By analogy, selfishness can be formalized as a social discount rate, representing how the subjective value of rewarding another person decreases with increasing social distance. Delay and social discount rates for reward are correlated across individuals. However no previous work has examined whether this relationship also holds for aversive outcomes. Neither has previous work described a functional form for social discounting of pain in humans. This is a pertinent question, since preferences over aversive outcomes formally diverge from those for reward. We addressed this issue in an experiment in which healthy adult participants (N = 67) chose the timing and intensity of hypothetical pain for themselves and others. In keeping with previous studies, participants showed a strong preference for immediate over delayed pain. Participants showed greater concern for pain in close others than for their own pain, though this hyperaltruism was steeply discounted with increasing social distance. Impatience for pain and social discounting of pain were weakly correlated across individuals. Our results extend a link between impatience and selfishness to the aversive domain

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed 'dread', is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N = 130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a 'Dread Empathy Gap'

Dreading the pain of others? Altruistic responses to others' pain underestimate dread

A dislike of waiting for pain, aptly termed ‘dread’, is so great that people will increase pain to avoid delaying it. However, despite many accounts of altruistic responses to pain in others, no previous studies have tested whether people take delay into account when attempting to ameliorate others' pain. We examined the impact of delay in 2 experiments where participants (total N = 130) specified the intensity and delay of pain either for themselves or another person. Participants were willing to increase the experimental pain of another participant to avoid delaying it, indicative of dread, though did so to a lesser extent than was the case for their own pain. We observed a similar attenuation in dread when participants chose the timing of a hypothetical painful medical treatment for a close friend or relative, but no such attenuation when participants chose for a more distant acquaintance. A model in which altruism is biased to privilege pain intensity over the dread of pain parsimoniously accounts for these findings. We refer to this underestimation of others' dread as a ‘Dread Empathy Gap’

Death's Shadow Lightened

Epicurus (in)famously argued that death is not harmful and therefore our standard reactions to it (like deep fear of death and going to great lengths to postpone it) are not rational, inaugurating an ongoing debate about the harm of death. Those who wish to resist this conclusion must identify the harm of death. But not any old harm will do. In order to resist both the claim that death is not harmful and the claim that our standard reactions to it are irrational, we must identify a harm associated with death that rationalizes our standard reactions. We can divide the potential harm properties death might have along two axes: intrinsic/extrinsic and instrumental/final. This gives us four places to search for the harm of death. I argue that it is nowhere to be found

Unpredictable pain timings lead to greater pain when people are highly intolerant of uncertainty

Abstract : Background and purpose: Many psychological factors are known to influence pain perception. Amongthem, intolerance of uncertainty (IU) may play a key modulating role in situations where uncertaintyprevails, especially uncertainty regarding the timing of painful events. The objective of this study was toexplore the impact of individual differences in IU on pain perception during predictable and unpredictablestimulation timings. We hypothesized that people with high IU, as opposed to those with low IU, wouldperceive more pain when the timing of painful stimulations cannot be predicted, as compared to whenthey can.Methods: Twenty (20) healthy adults, aged between 18 and 35 years old, were recruited. Painful sensa-tions were provoked using transcutaneous electrical stimulations of the right sural nerve. By measuringIU (Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale) and subjective pain (verbal numerical rating scale), it was possibleto test the relationship between IU and pain perception, by simulating predictable and unpredictablepainful experiences. This was done through cued shock interval (CSI) blocks, with either variable timingor fixed timings (long or short time frame). Self-administered questionnaires were also used to measurepain hypervigilance, pain catastrophizing, state anxiety, and trait anxiety.Results: Pearson correlations confirmed the presence of an association (r = 0.63) between IU and thechange in pain intensity provoked by unpredictable stimulation timings. Importantly, this associationwas significant only for stimulations provided at long CSIs, indicating that higher IU scores predictedhigher pain intensity scores when stimulation timings became unpredictable, and when the cued delaywas long. No association was found between pain scores and other psychological variables.Conclusions: Our results show that IU moderately correlates to the change in pain intensity provokedby unpredictable stimulation timings. High IU scores were associated with a worsening of the subjectivepain experience, especially during long delays in an unpredictable situation. These observations suggestthat IU could be considered as a psychological variable that is able to influence pain perception in certainsituations.Implications: Assessing and addressing IU could be an added value in pain-related therapy, especially in chronic pain

How A-theoretic Deprivationists Should Respond to Lucretius

ABSTRACT:What, if anything, makes death bad for the deceased themselves? Deprivationists hold that death is bad for the deceased iff it deprives them of intrinsic goods they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. This view faces the problem that birth too seems to deprive one of goods one would have enjoyed had one been born earlier, so that it too should be bad for one. There are two main approaches to the problem. In this paper, I explore the second approach, by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer, and suggest that it can be developed so as to meet deprivationists’ needs. On the resulting view, metaphysical differences between the future and the past give rise to a corresponding axiological difference in the intrinsic value of future and past experiences. As experiences move into the past, they lose their intrinsic value for the person.The work was mostly carried out while the author was a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation project ‘Intentionality as the Mark of the Mental: Metaphysical Perspectives on Contemporary Philosophy of Mind’ (Sinergia, CRSI11-127488), and partly while the author was a member of the Templeton World Charity Foundation project ‘Theology, Philosophy of Religion, and the Natural Sciences’This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Cambridge University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2015.

Pain: A Precision Signal for Reinforcement Learning and Control.

Since noxious stimulation usually leads to the perception of pain, pain has traditionally been considered sensory nociception. But its variability and sensitivity to a broad array of cognitive and motivational factors have meant it is commonly viewed as inherently imprecise and intangibly subjective. However, the core function of pain is motivational-to direct both short- and long-term behavior away from harm. Here, we illustrate that a reinforcement learning model of pain offers a mechanistic understanding of how the brain supports this, illustrating the underlying computational architecture of the pain system. Importantly, it explains why pain is tuned by multiple factors and necessarily supported by a distributed network of brain regions, recasting pain as a precise and objectifiable control signal

Temporal and social discounting of pain and illness

Unhealthy behaviour often entails short-term indulgence at the expense of long-term health. This thesis examines an hypothesis that temporal discounting, a measure of the extent to which a person devalues delayed benefit, predicts unhealthy behaviour. The work also evaluates temporal discounting as a psychological model for unhealthy behaviour, in particular unhealthy behaviour that is enacted in spite of healthy goals, and behaviour with painful consequences. Studies examining relationships between temporal discounting and health behaviour are systematically reviewed, with the finding that discounting of reward correlates with many forms of appetitive unhealthy behaviour. It is proposed that while steep discounting predisposes to unhealthy behaviour, goal-incongruent behaviour is better explained by the interfering effect of prelearned or innate values. Also, conventional discounting fails to account for the fact that many people prefer to expedite inevitable pain or illness. An explanation is that people dislike waiting for pain, termed ‘dread’. The empirical work of this thesis establishes how dread depends on delay, by asking participants to titrate the timing and severity of their own pain or that of others. For the average participant, the dread of pain accumulated at a decreasing rate as pain was delayed. Dread was found to be less marked when deciding on behalf of socially close others. Unexpectedly a tendency to dread future pain in one-off choices did not predict saving a budget of pain relief in sequential choices. Further experiments examined social discounting for pain, finding that participants appear more averse to causing pain in others than in themselves, a tendency that is discounted with social distance. Conclusions are that temporal discounting of reward is a promising marker of appetitive unhealthy behaviour, with a considerable evidence base, while dread offers a candidate marker for engagement in health-promoting behaviour with painful consequences, a possibility which demands further investigation.Open Acces

Schopenhauer's Pessimism

Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways in which life as a whole is structurally defective

The close proximity of threat: Altered distance perception in the anticipation of pain

Pain is an experience that powerfully influences the way we interact with our environment. What is less clear is the influence that pain has on the way we perceive our environment. We investigated the effect that the anticipation of experimental pain (THREAT) and its relief (RELIEF) has on the visual perception of space. Eighteen (11F) healthy volunteers estimated the distance to alternating THREAT and RELIEF stimuli that were placed within reachable space. The results determined that the estimated distance to the THREAT stimulus was significantly underestimated in comparison to the RELIEF stimulus. We conclude that pain-evoking stimuli are perceived as closer to the body than otherwise identical pain-relieving stimuli, an important consideration when applied to our decisions and behaviors in relation to the experience of pain