Lousberg R, Groenman N H, Schmidt A J, Gielen A A
Centre for Pain Expertise Academic Hospital Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Percept Mot Skills. 1996 Dec;83(3 Pt 1):883-900. doi: 10.2466/pms.1996.83.3.883.
Two experiments were carried out to study operant conditioning of pain report. Further, it was investigated whether pain-related psychophysiological and psychological measures (skin conductance response and magnitude matching) could also be conditioned operantly. In both experiments subjects received 12 painful electric shocks of equal intensity. In Exp. 1 healthy subjects were assigned to either a control group or an up-conditioning group. Up-conditioning occurred by verbally rewarding increases in pain report and punishing decreases. Analyses indicated that up-conditioning of both pain report and the pain-related psychophysiological measures succeeded. To rule out alternative explanations of the results (attention shift towards pain and conditioning of anxiety) the verbal punishments were adjusted in Exp. 2. A down-conditioning group was also added. The attempt to replicate the results of Exp. 1 failed and down-conditioning of the pain report could not be established. These inconsistent results are most probably due to modified punishment of responses. The consequences for the results of Exp. 1 are discussed. Based on the results of post hoc analyses, some suggestions are made for operant conditioning studies of pain.
进行了两项实验来研究疼痛报告的操作性条件反射。此外，还研究了与疼痛相关的心理生理和心理测量指标（皮肤电反应和量级匹配）是否也能通过操作性条件反射来调节。在两个实验中，受试者均接受了12次强度相等的疼痛电击。在实验1中，健康受试者被分为对照组或强化组。强化通过口头奖励疼痛报告的增加和惩罚疼痛报告的减少来实现。分析表明，疼痛报告和与疼痛相关的心理生理测量指标的强化均取得成功。为了排除对结果的其他解释（注意力转向疼痛和焦虑的条件反射），在实验2中调整了口头惩罚措施。还增加了一个弱化组。重复实验1结果的尝试失败了，疼痛报告的弱化未能实现。这些不一致的结果很可能是由于对反应的惩罚方式改变所致。讨论了对实验1结果的影响。基于事后分析的结果，对疼痛的操作性条件反射研究提出了一些建议。
