Williams, Amanda C de C;
(2023)
Pain: Behavioural expression and response in an evolutionary framework.
Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health
, 11
(1)
pp. 429-437.
10.1093/emph/eoad038.
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Abstract
An evolutionary perspective offers insights into the major public health problem of chronic (persistent) pain; behaviours associated with it perpetuate both pain and disability. Pain is motivating, and pain-related behaviours promote recovery by immediate active or passive defence; subsequent protection of wounds; suppression of competing responses; energy conservation; vigilance to threat; and learned avoidance of associated cues. When these persist beyond healing, as in chronic pain, they are disabling. In mammals, facial and bodily expression of pain is visible and identifiable by others, while social context, including conspecifics’ responses, modulate pain. Studies of responses to pain emphasize onlooker empathy, but people with chronic pain report feeling disbelieved and stigmatized. Observers frequently discount others’ pain, best understood in terms of cheater detection—alertness to free riders that underpins the capacity for prosocial behaviours. These dynamics occur both in everyday life and in clinical encounters, providing an account of the adaptiveness of pain-related behaviours.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Pain: Behavioural expression and response in an evolutionary framework |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1093/emph/eoad038 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1093/emph/eoad038 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Foundation for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Pain, response, evolutionary, facial expression, behaviour, empathy |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10182397 |
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