Oaten Megan J, Stevenson Richard J, Case Trevor I
Department of Applied Psychology, Griffith University, Southport QLD4222, Australia.
Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW2109, Australia.
Physiol Behav. 2015 Jan;138:107-12. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2014.10.023. Epub 2014 Oct 29.
Experiencing the emotion of disgust leads to delayed up-regulation of immune-related functions, increased core-body temperature and reduced appetite. These changes parallel those of the acute phase response, which occurs when a pathogen is detected by the immune system. Here we examined whether a further predicted aspect of the acute phase response is evident following disgust induction, namely increased pain sensitivity. Participants attended a two-session experiment. On one session they experienced an emotion induction (being randomly assigned to either disgust, negative or positive groups) and on the other they received a neutral control induction. Before and after each induction, and at 15 and 30min post-induction, participants engaged in a cold-pressor task, rating pain intensity at 10s intervals for 90s on each occasion. Relative to neutral control and pre-test, average pain intensity decreased then increased across time following the disgust induction, with the reverse pattern in the negative and positive emotion inductions. These findings are the first to suggest that disgust may lead to an increase in pain sensitivity over a time course paralleling changes observed for core-body temperature and immune-related function, although the mechanisms underpinning these effects remain to be identified.
体验厌恶情绪会导致免疫相关功能的上调延迟、核心体温升高和食欲下降。这些变化与急性期反应相似，急性期反应是在免疫系统检测到病原体时发生的。在这里，我们研究了在诱发厌恶情绪后，急性期反应的另一个预测方面是否明显，即疼痛敏感性增加。参与者参加了一个两阶段的实验。在一个阶段中，他们经历了情绪诱导（被随机分配到厌恶、消极或积极组），在另一个阶段中，他们接受了中性对照诱导。在每次诱导之前和之后，以及诱导后15分钟和30分钟，参与者进行冷加压任务，每次以10秒的间隔对疼痛强度进行90秒的评分。相对于中性对照和预测试，在诱发厌恶情绪后，平均疼痛强度随时间先下降后上升，而在消极和积极情绪诱导中则呈现相反的模式。这些发现首次表明，厌恶情绪可能会在与核心体温和免疫相关功能变化平行的时间进程中导致疼痛敏感性增加，尽管这些效应的潜在机制仍有待确定。
