The development of a self-administered psychophysical scaling method: range effects.

Area of Science:

• Psychology
• Pain Research
• Psychophysics

Background:

• Assessing pain intensity and unpleasantness is crucial for effective treatment.
• Cross-modal matching tasks are established methods for pain assessment.
• Self-administered tasks offer potential for wider accessibility in pain research.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the feasibility and reliability of a self-administered cross-modal matching task for scaling pain intensity and unpleasantness.
• To determine the internal consistency of pain descriptor scaling in a self-administered format.
• To compare the performance of self-administered pain scaling with existing methods.

Main Methods:

• 101 subjects participated in a self-administered cross-modal matching task.
• Pain intensity and unpleasantness descriptors were scaled using standard stimuli.
• Internal consistency (reliability) was calculated using correlation coefficients (r).
• Different reliability criteria (r ≥ 0.90, r ≥ 0.85, r ≥ 0.80) were applied to assess performance.

Main Results:

• With a reliability criterion of r ≥ 0.90, significant percentages of subjects failed to reliably calibrate unpleasantness (60%) and intensity (6%) descriptors.
• Relaxing the criterion to r ≥ 0.85 enabled all subjects to reliably scale intensity descriptors.
• Further relaxation to r ≥ 0.80 reduced the failure rate for unpleasantness descriptors to 24%.
• A fixed reference value introduced range effects but did not severely attenuate the scale's range.

Conclusions:

• A self-administered cross-administered matching task is a feasible method for pain assessment.
• Reliability for scaling unpleasantness descriptors requires further investigation and potential refinement.
• The findings compare favorably with existing pain assessment data from chronic and non-chronic pain patients.