Investigating cognitive resource depletion on self and others’ pain evaluations: A research study

Evaluation of pain is a crucial ability to help others, particularly in clinical settings. Caregivers assess their patients’ pain under high workload and fatigue, often while dealing with competing tasks. However, the effect played by such cognitive strain in the appraisal of others’ pain is still unclear. Previous research has shown that this cognitive strain leads to a depletion of cognitive resources, which influences the perception of ones’ own pain. Therefore, the research conducted in this study was aimed at investigating whether the judgment of others’ pain is affected by cognitive resources depletion similarly or differently with respect to self-pain. To address this issue, 32 participants were presented with incremental laser stimulation with three levels of pain to represent self-pain and video-clips of chronic shoulder patients in pain to represent others-pain. They were then required to judge the painful stimuli after a low vs high workload condition of the “Numerical Stroop task”, a neuropsychological test used to evaluate the capacity to withstanding cognitive interference. In this study, we measured both subjective ratings to self-pain and other pain, but also physiological measures such as heart rate to better characterise the cognitive depleting effect of the Stroop test on the subjects’ pain evaluation. Our Results confirm the cognitive interference effect of the Stroop task and indicate an influence of the high load condition on the perception of self-pain. We also confirmed biases on the evaluation of observed pain.