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Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Affective and social pain modulation in children-Experimental evidence using picture viewing
Katrin Hillmer1, Judith Kappesser1, Christiane Hermann1
1Department of Clinical Psychology, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Giessen, Germany.
Insights
Viewing mothers' faces or positive scenes can reduce children's pain perception and facial muscle activity. This suggests social-affective factors significantly influence pediatric pain experiences.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Pain Management
- Social Psychology
- Psychophysiology
Background:
- Children experience pain, which is modulated by social-affective factors, similar to adults.
- Factors like catastrophizing influence pain modulation, but this is under-researched in children.
- Previous research has not experimentally explored social-affective pain modulation in pediatric populations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the pain-modulating effects of social-affective stimuli in children.
- To examine how personal meaning (e.g., mother's face) and affective content of images influence pain perception.
- To explore the role of individual characteristics like anxiety and catastrophizing in pain modulation.
Main Methods:
- Forty-two children (aged 8-13) received tonic heat pain while viewing various images.
- Stimuli included mothers' faces, strangers' faces (neutral/happy), and positive/negative scenes.
- Subjective pain ratings and psychophysiological measures (skin conductance, heart rate, corrugator EMG) were recorded.
Main Results:
- Mothers' faces and positive scenes decreased subjective pain and corrugator activity.
- Happy stranger faces reduced corrugator activity, indicating facial muscle modulation.
- Negative stimuli primarily increased psychophysiological pain responses; catastrophizing correlated with pain relief via mothers' faces, mediated by arousal.
Conclusions:
- Positive social-affective stimuli, like mothers' faces, alleviate pain in children, extending adult findings.
- Reduced pain-related facial muscle activity is a key outcome of these stimuli.
- The study highlights the interaction between catastrophizing, social context, and children's pain, suggesting simple visual stimuli can offer clinical benefits.
Background:
Children frequently encounter pain. Their pain like adults' pain is probably modulated by social-affective factors. Despite its clinical relevance, such pain modulation has not been explored experimentally in children, and little is known about specific factors accounting for it such as catastrophizing. We examined pain modulating effects of pictures varying in social-affective content and personal meaning (e.g., mothers' vs. strangers' faces) using subjective and psychophysiological measures (skin conductance, heart rate, corrugator electromyography) as outcomes.
Methods:
Forty-two children (8-13 years) underwent tonic heat pain stimulation while viewing pictures (social-affective: their mothers' faces with neutral expression, strangers' neutral and happy faces; affective: positive and negative scenes). Furthermore, the contribution of children's characteristics (e.g., anxiety, catastrophizing) and facets of the parent-child relationship to pain modulation was determined.
Results:
Viewing mothers' faces or positive scenes reduced subjective pain intensity and corrugator activity in response to pain. Viewing happy strangers' faces lowered corrugator activity. Enhanced pain experience due to negative affective stimuli was primarily observed psychophysiologically. The correlation between children's tendency to catastrophize and pain relief by mothers' faces was mediated by induced arousal, likely reflecting the degree of motivational activation of seeking social support.
Conclusions:
Pain relief by positive affective and social-affective stimuli extends previous findings in adults, especially regarding reduced pain-related facial muscle activity. Moreover, the results shed light on the interplay between catastrophizing and social context on children's pain experience. Clinically, our results imply that just looking at pictures of their mothers (or positive scenes) might help to alleviate pain in children.
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