Official websites use. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Children frequently encounter pain. Despite its clinical relevance, such pain modulation has not been explored experimentally in children, and little is known about specific factors accounting for it such as catastrophizing.
We examined pain modulating effects of pictures varying in social-affective content and personal meaning e. Enhanced pain experience due to negative affective stimuli was primarily observed psychophysiologically. Pain relief by positive affective and social-affective stimuli extends previous findings in adults, especially regarding reduced pain-related facial muscle activity.
Clinically, our results imply that just looking at pictures of their mothers or positive scenes might help to alleviate pain in children. Social and affective factors are both assumed to modulate pain experiences as proposed, for example, by the Socio-Communication Model of Pain [ 1 , 2 ]. In adults, affective pain modulation has frequently been tested experimentally using pictures to induce affective states. In general, positive affective states reduce the pain experience, while negative affective states increase it [ 9 — 12 ].
To our knowledge, affective pain modulation has not been addressed experimentally in children. Social and affective pain modulation are not independent from each other. Significant others or strangers can induce different affective states, for example, by having an acquired affective quality, or by facially expressing affective states [ 13 — 15 ].
For example, Hillmer and colleagues [ 16 ] found pain modulating effects in adults not only when viewing partner pictures with neutral facial expressions but having a positive personal value , but also when viewing stranger pictures with happy facial expressions.
