2,081 research outputs found
Habituation to pain : a motivational-ethological perspective
Habituation to pain is mainly studied using external pain stimuli in healthy volunteers, often to identify the
underlying brain mechanisms, or to investigate problems in habituation in specific forms of pain (eg, migraine). Although these studies provide insight, they do not address one pertinent question: Why do we habituate to pain? Pain is a warning signal that urges us to react. Habituation to pain may thus be dysfunctional: It could make us unresponsive in situations where sensitivity and swift response to bodily damage are essential. Early theories of habituation were well aware of this argument. Sokolov argued that responding to pain should not decrease, but rather increase with repeated exposure, a phenomenon he called “sensitization.” His position makes intuitive sense: Why would individuals respond less to pain that inherently signals bodily harm? In this topical review, we address this question from a motivational ethological perspective. First, we describe some core characteristics of habituation. Second, we discuss theories that explain how and when habituation occurs. Third, we introduce a motivational-ethological perspective on habituation and explain why habituation occurs. Finally, we discuss how a focus on habituation to
pain introduces important methodological, theoretical, and clinical implications, otherwise overlooked
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Genetic Discrimination: Overview of the Issue and Proposed Legislation
[Excerpt] A key policy issue before Congress is whether the potential for genetic discrimination by employers and insurers merits protections for genetic information that are more extensive than those already in place for health information. For the stated purpose of prohibiting discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2007 (H.R. 493) was introduced in the House on January 16, 2007. On January 22, 2007, the act was introduced in the Senate (S. 358). The act is identical to the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2005, which passed the Senate by a vote of 98-0 (S. 306, 109th). An identical House bill (H.R. 1227, 109th), never came to a vote. S. 306 was very similar to S. 1053 (108th), which the Senate passed in 2003 by a vote of 95-0. A distinct House bill, H.R. 1910 (108th), never came to a vote. This report focuses on the key points in the ongoing debate about genetic discrimination legislation
Literature reviews are not all the same
I was very interested in the discussion in the Editorial of the first 2017 issue of Torture Journal which referred to two similar literature reviews with opposite conclusions (Weiss et al., 2016; Patel, Williams, & Kellezi, 2016; Patel, Kellezi, & Williams, 2014) and would like to clarify and elaborate some of the differences, which I think are of relevance to the conclusions
Deconstructing the Producer-Consumer Problem with Bus
Many statisticians would agree that, had it not been for DHTs, the improvement of DHCP might never have occurred. In this position paper, we validate the analysis of gigabit switches, demonstrates the robust importance of hardware and architecture. In our research, we concentrate our efforts on showing that Internet QoS and local-area networks are entirely in- compatible
Learning Bodily and Temporal Attention in Protective Movement Behavior Detection
For people with chronic pain, the assessment of protective behavior during
physical functioning is essential to understand their subjective pain-related
experiences (e.g., fear and anxiety toward pain and injury) and how they deal
with such experiences (avoidance or reliance on specific body joints), with the
ultimate goal of guiding intervention. Advances in deep learning (DL) can
enable the development of such intervention. Using the EmoPain MoCap dataset,
we investigate how attention-based DL architectures can be used to improve the
detection of protective behavior by capturing the most informative temporal and
body configurational cues characterizing specific movements and the strategies
used to perform them. We propose an end-to-end deep learning architecture named
BodyAttentionNet (BANet). BANet is designed to learn temporal and bodily parts
that are more informative to the detection of protective behavior. The approach
addresses the variety of ways people execute a movement (including healthy
people) independently of the type of movement analyzed. Through extensive
comparison experiments with other state-of-the-art machine learning techniques
used with motion capture data, we show statistically significant improvements
achieved by using these attention mechanisms. In addition, the BANet
architecture requires a much lower number of parameters than the state of the
art for comparable if not higher performances.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, code available, accepted in ACII 201
Chronic-Pain Protective Behavior Detection with Deep Learning
In chronic pain rehabilitation, physiotherapists adapt physical activity to
patients' performance based on their expression of protective behavior,
gradually exposing them to feared but harmless and essential everyday
activities. As rehabilitation moves outside the clinic, technology should
automatically detect such behavior to provide similar support. Previous works
have shown the feasibility of automatic protective behavior detection (PBD)
within a specific activity. In this paper, we investigate the use of deep
learning for PBD across activity types, using wearable motion capture and
surface electromyography data collected from healthy participants and people
with chronic pain. We approach the problem by continuously detecting protective
behavior within an activity rather than estimating its overall presence. The
best performance reaches mean F1 score of 0.82 with leave-one-subject-out cross
validation. When protective behavior is modelled per activity type, performance
is mean F1 score of 0.77 for bend-down, 0.81 for one-leg-stand, 0.72 for
sit-to-stand, 0.83 for stand-to-sit, and 0.67 for reach-forward. This
performance reaches excellent level of agreement with the average experts'
rating performance suggesting potential for personalized chronic pain
management at home. We analyze various parameters characterizing our approach
to understand how the results could generalize to other PBD datasets and
different levels of ground truth granularity.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, 7 tables. Accepted by ACM Transactions on
Computing for Healthcar
Exploration of Hospital Inpatients' Use of the Verbal Rating Scale of Pain
Background: Assessment of pain largely relies on self-report. Hospitals routinely use pain scales, such as the Verbal Rating Scale (VRS), to record patients' pain, but such scales are unidimensional, concatenating pain intensity and other dimensions of pain with significant loss of clinical information. This study explored how inpatients understand and use the VRS in a hospital setting. Methods: Forty five participants were interviewed, with data analysed by thematic analysis, and completed a task concerned with the VRS and communication of other dimensions of pain. Results: Participants anchored their pain experience in the physical properties of pain, its tolerability, and its impact on functioning. Their relationship to analgesic medication, personal coping styles, and experiences of staff all influenced how they used the VRS to communicate their pain. Conclusion: Participants grounded and explained their pain in semantically similar but idiosyncratic ways. The VRS was used to combine pain intensity with multiple other elements of pain and often as a way to request analgesic medication. Pain scores need to be explored and elaborated by patient and staff, content of which will imply access to non-pharmacological resources to manage pain
Reviewing outcomes of psychological interventions with torture survivors: Conceptual, methodological and ethical Issues
Background: Torture survivors face multiple problems, including psychological difficulties, whether they are refugees or remain in the country where they were tortured. Provision of rehabilitation varies not only with the needs of survivors and resources available but also with service models, service provider preferences and the local and country context. Despite increasing efforts in research on the effectiveness of psychological interventions with torture survivors, results are inconclusive.
Methods: We undertook a Cochrane systematic review of psychological, social and welfare provision, with meta-analysis to best estimate efficacy. The process raised conceptual, methodological and ethical issues of relevance to the wider field. Findings: We searched very widely, but rejected hundreds of papers which recommended treatment without providing evidence. We found nine randomized controlled trials, from developed and under-resourced settings. All conceptualized survivors’ problems in psychiatric terms, using outcomes of post-traumatic stress symptoms, distress, and quality of life, by self-report, with or without translation or unstandardized interpretation, and with little mention of cultural or language issues. None used social or welfare interventions. Four related studies used narrative exposure therapy (NET) in a brief form, and without ensuring a safe setting as recommended. Five used mixed methods, including exposure, cognitive behavioral therapy, and eye movement desensitization. Combined, the studies showed no immediate improvement in PTSD, distress, or quality of life; at six months follow-up, a minority showed some improvement in PTSD and distress, although participants remained severely affected.
Conclusions: While applauding researchers’ commitment in running these trials, we raise ethical issues about exposure in particular, and about the effects of shortcomings in methodology, particularly around assessment using unfamiliar cultural frameworks and language, and the lack of concern about dropout which may indicate harm. The issues addressed aid interpretation of existing research, and guide clinical practice as well as future studies evaluating its effectiveness.
 
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