Does the expectation influence how it actually feels?
I am a professor of psychology and neuroscience who, together with my colleagues at the National Institutes of Health, decided to explore how a child’s expectation of pain influences their actual experience, particularly anxious children. It is well-established that children are highly impressionable and easily influenced by social media, their friends, and what they see on television. The question of whether children, like adults, are influenced by expectations has not been studied in a systematic way.
Our goal was to understand the effects of expectation on preparing children for upcoming painful procedures to inform treatment of pediatric pain in anxious patients. We suspected that if children expected pain, that’s how they would perceive it. We designed an experiment to test it.
To prepare for our study, we applied heat to each child’s arm and asked them to rate levels of pain as low, medium or high. Then, during the experiment we focused on just the one temperature that each participant rated as medium.
In our experiment we preceded the medium temperature test with two kinds of tones. One tone signaled to the child that gentle low heat was coming and the other that painful high heat was coming. When we asked children how painful the heat was, they rated the same temperature as more painful when it was preceded by a high tone.
Of course, it is important to be truthful and not discount a child’s worries altogether. The point is not to deny that pain will occur, but rather to not hype it up and inadvertently impact children’s experience.