Investigating mortality salience as a potential causal influence and moderator of responses to laboratory pain

PeerJ. 2024 Apr 3:12:e17204. doi: 10.7717/peerj.17204. eCollection 2024.

Abstract

Background: Because pain can have profound ramifications for quality of life and daily functioning, understanding nuances in the interplay of psychosocial experiences with pain perception is vital for effective pain management. In separate lines of research, pain resilience and mortality salience have emerged as potentially important psychological correlates of reduced pain severity and increased tolerance of pain. However, to date, there has been a paucity of research examining potentially interactive effects of these factors on pain perception. To address this gap, the present experiment investigated mortality salience as a causal influence on tolerance of laboratory pain and a moderator of associations between pain resilience and pain tolerance within a Chinese sample.

Methods: Participants were healthy young Chinese adults (86 women, 84 men) who first completed a brief initial cold pressor test (CPT) followed by measures of demographics and pain resilience. Subsequently, participants randomly assigned to a mortality salience (MS) condition completed two open-ended essay questions in which they wrote about their death as well as a death anxiety scale while those randomly assigned to a control condition completed analogous tasks about watching television. Finally, all participants engaged in a delay task and a second CPT designed to measure post-manipulation pain tolerance and subjective pain intensity levels.

Results: MS condition cohorts showed greater pain tolerance than controls on the post-manipulation CPT, though pain intensity levels did not differ between groups. Moderator analyses indicated that the relationship between the behavior perseverance facet of pain resilience and pain tolerance was significantly stronger among MS condition participants than controls.

Conclusions: This experiment is the first to document potential causal effects of MS on pain tolerance and Ms as a moderator of the association between self-reported behavior perseverance and behavioral pain tolerance. Findings provide foundations for extensions within clinical pain samples.

Keywords: Moderation effects; Mortality salience; Pain resilience; Pain tolerance.

Publication types

  • Randomized Controlled Trial

MeSH terms

  • Adult
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Male
  • Pain Measurement / psychology
  • Pain Perception / physiology
  • Pain Threshold / psychology
  • Pain* / psychology
  • Quality of Life*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Science and Technology Fund Project of Guizhou Provincial Health Commission (gzwkj2022-482), Special Research Project in the Nursing Discipline at Guizhou Medical University (YJ22015), High-Level Talent Startup Fund Project at Guizhou Medical University (Doctoral Contract J2021057), Chinese National Natural Science Foundation Incubation Program at Guizhou Medical University (22NSFCP41) and Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (31871141). There was no additional external funding received for this study. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.