{"id":615,"date":"2023-03-03T19:13:46","date_gmt":"2023-03-03T19:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/psychology-in-real-life-love-and-pain\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T17:01:20","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T17:01:20","slug":"psychology-in-real-life-love-and-pain","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/chapter\/psychology-in-real-life-love-and-pain\/","title":{"raw":"Relationships: Learn It 4\u2014Psych in Real Life: Love and Pain","rendered":"Relationships: Learn It 4\u2014Psych in Real Life: Love and Pain"},"content":{"raw":"<h2>Good Relationships Correlate With Better Health<\/h2>\r\n<p>An impressive amount of research from psychology and medicine supports the claim that having a strong social support network\u2014 supportive friends and family\u2014is associated with maintaining both physical and psychological health and recovering quickly and effectively from physical and psychological problems.<\/p>\r\n<p>The goal of scientific psychology is to understand the deep underlying causes of psychological and behavioral factors. Evidence that there is an association between health and social support is the beginning\u2014not the end\u2014of scientific investigation. We want to know <em>why<\/em> such a relationship exists.<\/p>\r\n<p>Correlations can identify interesting relationships (e.g., there is a positive correlation between a person's amount of social support and success in recovering from physical and psychological problems), but they usually cannot provide strong evidence for why that relationship exists. That is the job of experiments.<\/p>\r\n<p>When you design an experiment, you must often create a very specific situation to test and explore your ideas. We have been talking in grand terms about \u201csocial support networks\u201d and \u201cmental and physical health,\u201d but individual experiments typically cannot work on such a broad scale. Instead, the experimenter tries to find a single simple type of social support that can be manipulated in the laboratory and a single simple element of health that can be measured and studied in the laboratory. One disadvantage of this sharp focus on a specific situation in experiments is that a single experiment\u2014even a single set of related experiments\u2014is unlikely to fully identify the causes we are looking for. Experimental evidence typically accumulates slowly, over long periods of time, filled with apparent contradictions that can take time and effort to sort out.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_5035\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"200\"]<img class=\"wp-image-5035 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24172030\/diverse-diversity-hands-302354-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two people holding hands.\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/> <strong>Figure 1.<\/strong> Does holding a loved one's hand decrease your experience of pain?[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<p>We are going to look at two experiments from different research teams that take a similar approach to trying to understand if social contact influences a health-related experience\u2014in this case, pain\u2014and how such an influence might work (i.e., what might be the causal mechanisms?).<\/p>\r\n<h2>Experiment 1: Love and Pain<\/h2>\r\n<p>Sarah L. Master and her colleagues[footnote]Sarah Master was then a graduate student at UCLA and is now a research associate with a Ph.D. at UCLA. Several of her co-authors are major figures in the field of health psychology. For example, co-author Shelly Taylor is one of the founders of the field of health psychology.[\/footnote] conducted a simple experiment that they published in 2009. Their subjects were healthy college students who volunteered to participate in an experiment that tested the idea that contact with a romantic partner can reduce our experience of pain.<\/p>\r\n<h3>Participants<\/h3>\r\n<p>Master and her colleagues recruited heterosexual couples to participate in their study.[footnote]Researchers must often decide between restricting the characteristics of their subjects to simplify factors influencing the results versus opening the experiment to a broader range of subjects to improve generalizability and representativeness. Restriction of the participants in this study to heterosexual couples does not imply that couples with other gender identities or sexual orientations are either unimportant or uninteresting. [\/footnote] The women were the actual subjects in the study. Their male partners participated as part of the experimental manipulation. The participants were in stable, long-term (defined here as longer than 6 months) relationships.<\/p>\r\n<h3>Pain Induction<\/h3>\r\n<p>Before the experiment began, each woman was tested to find her personal pain experiences for thermal stimulation (i.e., heat), which was produced by a medical device called a thermode. Different people experience and report pain very differently, so calibration of the thermal stimulation to the individual\u2019s pain experience was essential. The thermal stimulation during the experiment was adjusted to the point at which the subject reported a \u201cmoderate\u201d level of discomfort (10 on a 20-point discomfort scale) when the heat was applied. This means that different people experienced different objective amounts of heat, while the subjective \u201cdiscomfort\u201d should have been approximately the same. The heat stimulus was delivered to the soft inside of the right forearm[footnote]Alternating among three different locations on different trials. [\/footnote], and each one lasted for 6 seconds.<\/p>\r\n<section class=\"textbox connectIt\">\r\n<h3>Experimental Conditions<\/h3>\r\n<p>There were seven conditions in the experiment.<\/p>\r\n<p>In three of the conditions, the woman held something in her hand as she experienced the painful thermal stimulation. She held either:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The hand of her partner (who sat behind a curtain, and\u2014except for his hand\u2014was not visible).<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The hand of a male stranger (who was also behind a curtain).<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An object: a squeeze ball.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>In three other conditions, the woman looked at a picture on a computer screen in front of her. She saw either:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A picture of her partner taken while the woman was being prepared for the experiment.<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A picture of a male stranger (similar age and matched for ethnicity with the woman\u2019s partner).<\/li>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An object: a picture of a chair.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>One control (or baseline) condition:<\/p>\r\n<ul>\r\n\t<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The woman looked at a fixation cross on the computer screen.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<p>The figure below shows summarizes the organization (technically, the \u201cdesign\u201d) of the experiment.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_7343\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"1281\"]<img class=\"wp-image-7343 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24224918\/loveandpain.png\" alt=\"There are two independent variables and six conditions for this experiment. The girl either held the hand of her partner, of a stranger, or held an object (a rubber ball), or looked at a picture of her partner, a stranger, or an object (a chair). There was also a control condition in which the participant viewed a fixation for a cross control condition.\" width=\"1281\" height=\"363\" \/> <em>[Click to open in a new tab.]\u00a0<\/em>[\/caption]\r\n<\/section>\r\n<h3>Procedure<\/h3>\r\n<p>The woman received twelve thermal stimulations in each condition. The order of presentation of conditions was randomized for each woman.[footnote]The randomization procedure was a bit more complicated than this explanation suggests. See the original paper if you want to know exactly what they did.[\/footnote] There was a 20-second break between stimulations. After each stimulation, the subject rated how \u201cuncomfortable\u201d the stimulus was on a 21-point scale.<\/p>\r\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\">[ohm2_question height=\"550\"]4375[\/ohm2_question]<\/section>\r\n<h3>Results<\/h3>\r\n<p>To take account of individual differences, the control condition (i.e., looking at a fixation cross on a computer screen) the experimenters found the difference between each person\u2019s average control condition unpleasantness rating and her rating for each condition. For example, imagine that one participant has the following average \u201cunpleasantness\u201d ratings (on the 21-point scale):[footnote]As any doctor will tell you, getting a valid and reliable rating of pain is notoriously difficult. Master and her colleagues used a scale (the Gracely Box Scale) that is widely used in research and has been extensively validated.[\/footnote]<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_7346\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"450\"]<img class=\"wp-image-7346\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24225349\/loveandpain21.png\" alt=\"The results from one person's pleasantness ratings. When her partner\u2019s hand she scored a 9. When holding a stranger\u2019s hand, 14, and when holding an object, 12. When viewing her partner's picture, she scored an 8, when viewing a stranger \u2019s picture she scored 11, and when viewing an object she scored a 11. The control condition scored a 10.\" width=\"450\" height=\"239\" \/> <strong>Figure 1<\/strong>. Imagine these are the unpleasantness ratings given by a participant. According to their results, they found the most unpleasant pain experience was while holding a stranger's hand or by holding an object. Holding their partner's hand or looking at a picture of their partner was only slightly better than the control of looking at a cross on the computer screen.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<p>The control rating (10) is then subtracted from each of the treatment ratings. This becomes the score that is analyzed (called a \u201cdifference score\u201d). This method allows each woman to have a different general pain level (in the example, it is \u201c10\u201d but another person might have \u201c6\u201d or \u201c12\u201d as her average). The difference score looks at each person\u2019s change from her personal baseline under the various conditions.<\/p>\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_7674\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"450\"]<img class=\"wp-image-7674\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/28172222\/loveandpain3a.png\" alt=\"A participant's ratings as compared to the original control rating which was 10. The difference between the control score and the different condition scores are as follows: when holding her partner's hand, the score is negative 1, when holding a stranger\u2019s hand the difference is positive 4 , and when holding an object the difference between the pleasantness score and the control score is positive 2. It is negative 2 when viewing her partner's picture, positive 1 when looking at a stranger and positive1 when looking at an object.\" width=\"450\" height=\"239\" \/> Figure 2. Here you see the participant's pain ratings once all of their ratings are compared with their control condition.[\/caption]\r\n\r\n<p>For the difference scores, a positive number means that the experience in that condition was <em>more<\/em> painful than it was in the control condition. A negative number means that the experience in that condition was <em>less<\/em> painful than it was in the control condition. The exact number used indicates how much more or less painful the experience was.<\/p>\r\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\r\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\">\r\n<h3>Try It<\/h3>\r\n<p>Before we show you the actual results of the experiment, we\u2019d like you to predict what you think happened in this experiment. Use the figure below. The zero baseline is the control condition. Your predictions are about the six treatment conditions. You can click and drag on a bar to move the bar up, if you think that condition was more painful for the subject than the baseline control. And you can move a bar down if you think that condition was less painful than the baseline control condition.<br \/>\r\n<br \/>\r\nThe initial screen below shows all six of the treatment conditions as a tiny bit more painful than the baseline control. Make your predictions based on your own theory about the possible positive or negative effects of holding the hands of a person you love or of a stranger, or looking at a picture of a person you love or a stranger while you are in pain. Remember that zero baseline control is still very painful, so zero does not mean that there is no pain.<\/p>\r\n<center><iframe src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/oerfiles\/Psychology\/interactives\/love_pain.html\" width=\"650\" height=\"400\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/center>\r\n<p><br \/>\r\n[reveal-answer q=\"585162\"]Click here to see the actual results of the study.[\/reveal-answer]<br \/>\r\n[hidden-answer a=\"585162\"]<br \/>\r\n<img class=\"aligncenter wp-image-5022 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/23190547\/image1-1.png\" alt=\"Actual results show that holding hands of a partner reduced pain by .5, but holding hands with a stranger increased it by 1.5 and holding an object increased to almost 1. Looking at a picture of a partner reduced pain by 1, looking at a picture of a stranger increased it by .25 and looking at an object increased pain by .1.\" width=\"406\" height=\"240\" \/>[\/hidden-answer]<\/p>\r\n<\/section>\r\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\">[ohm2_question height=\"550\"]4376[\/ohm2_question]<\/section>\r\n<section class=\"textbox interact\">Let's use these results to rank the order of the conditions in terms of their effect on pain. Drag the condition name on the right into the appropriate box next to the rank order number on the left. <iframe src=\"https:\/\/lumenlearning.h5p.com\/content\/1290477388969288438\/embed\" width=\"1088\" height=\"762\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><script src=\"https:\/\/lumenlearning.h5p.com\/js\/h5p-resizer.js\" charset=\"UTF-8\"><\/script><\/section>\r\n<h3>Conclusions<\/h3>\r\n<p>These results suggest that there is something special about a person we love\u2014or at least someone we like. Dr. Master noted that looking at a picture of a loved one may be slightly more beneficial than holding his hand, though this difference did not quite reach statistical significance. Holding a stranger\u2019s hand exaggerated the pain experience by a considerable amount, so it is clear that (in the context of this experiment) human contact alone is not enough to relieve pain.<\/p>\r\n<p>Dr. Master makes a practical suggestion: If you are going to have a painful medical procedure, bringing a picture of someone you love may be helpful in reducing the pain. In fact, based on a comparison of the hand-holding and picture-viewing conditions, you may actually be better off bringing a picture than bringing the actual person to the painful procedure.<\/p>\r\n<p>Here is her final conclusion: \u201cIn sum, these findings challenge the notion that the beneficial effects of social support come solely from supportive social interactions and suggest that simple reminders of loved ones may be sufficient to engender feelings of support.\u201d If you think back to the introduction to this activity, we said that our goal was to find out how and why social support leads to better health outcomes. As we cautioned you, this experiment doesn\u2019t even come close to answering that question. However, it does take us one little step in the right direction, suggesting that \u201csocial support\u201d may be more complicated than just having people near us or even a group of friends. \u201cSocial support\u201d may involve triggering certain cognitive (mental) processes, such as memories and emotions, that are associated with strong positive relationships. That is for future research to clarify.<\/p>","rendered":"<h2>Good Relationships Correlate With Better Health<\/h2>\n<p>An impressive amount of research from psychology and medicine supports the claim that having a strong social support network\u2014 supportive friends and family\u2014is associated with maintaining both physical and psychological health and recovering quickly and effectively from physical and psychological problems.<\/p>\n<p>The goal of scientific psychology is to understand the deep underlying causes of psychological and behavioral factors. Evidence that there is an association between health and social support is the beginning\u2014not the end\u2014of scientific investigation. We want to know <em>why<\/em> such a relationship exists.<\/p>\n<p>Correlations can identify interesting relationships (e.g., there is a positive correlation between a person&#8217;s amount of social support and success in recovering from physical and psychological problems), but they usually cannot provide strong evidence for why that relationship exists. That is the job of experiments.<\/p>\n<p>When you design an experiment, you must often create a very specific situation to test and explore your ideas. We have been talking in grand terms about \u201csocial support networks\u201d and \u201cmental and physical health,\u201d but individual experiments typically cannot work on such a broad scale. Instead, the experimenter tries to find a single simple type of social support that can be manipulated in the laboratory and a single simple element of health that can be measured and studied in the laboratory. One disadvantage of this sharp focus on a specific situation in experiments is that a single experiment\u2014even a single set of related experiments\u2014is unlikely to fully identify the causes we are looking for. Experimental evidence typically accumulates slowly, over long periods of time, filled with apparent contradictions that can take time and effort to sort out.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_5035\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-5035\" style=\"width: 200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-5035 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24172030\/diverse-diversity-hands-302354-200x300.jpg\" alt=\"Two people holding hands.\" width=\"200\" height=\"300\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-5035\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Figure 1.<\/strong> Does holding a loved one&#8217;s hand decrease your experience of pain?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>We are going to look at two experiments from different research teams that take a similar approach to trying to understand if social contact influences a health-related experience\u2014in this case, pain\u2014and how such an influence might work (i.e., what might be the causal mechanisms?).<\/p>\n<h2>Experiment 1: Love and Pain<\/h2>\n<p>Sarah L. Master and her colleagues<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Sarah Master was then a graduate student at UCLA and is now a research associate with a Ph.D. at UCLA. Several of her co-authors are major figures in the field of health psychology. For example, co-author Shelly Taylor is one of the founders of the field of health psychology.\" id=\"return-footnote-615-1\" href=\"#footnote-615-1\" aria-label=\"Footnote 1\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[1]<\/sup><\/a> conducted a simple experiment that they published in 2009. Their subjects were healthy college students who volunteered to participate in an experiment that tested the idea that contact with a romantic partner can reduce our experience of pain.<\/p>\n<h3>Participants<\/h3>\n<p>Master and her colleagues recruited heterosexual couples to participate in their study.<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Researchers must often decide between restricting the characteristics of their subjects to simplify factors influencing the results versus opening the experiment to a broader range of subjects to improve generalizability and representativeness. Restriction of the participants in this study to heterosexual couples does not imply that couples with other gender identities or sexual orientations are either unimportant or uninteresting.\" id=\"return-footnote-615-2\" href=\"#footnote-615-2\" aria-label=\"Footnote 2\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[2]<\/sup><\/a> The women were the actual subjects in the study. Their male partners participated as part of the experimental manipulation. The participants were in stable, long-term (defined here as longer than 6 months) relationships.<\/p>\n<h3>Pain Induction<\/h3>\n<p>Before the experiment began, each woman was tested to find her personal pain experiences for thermal stimulation (i.e., heat), which was produced by a medical device called a thermode. Different people experience and report pain very differently, so calibration of the thermal stimulation to the individual\u2019s pain experience was essential. The thermal stimulation during the experiment was adjusted to the point at which the subject reported a \u201cmoderate\u201d level of discomfort (10 on a 20-point discomfort scale) when the heat was applied. This means that different people experienced different objective amounts of heat, while the subjective \u201cdiscomfort\u201d should have been approximately the same. The heat stimulus was delivered to the soft inside of the right forearm<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"Alternating among three different locations on different trials.\" id=\"return-footnote-615-3\" href=\"#footnote-615-3\" aria-label=\"Footnote 3\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[3]<\/sup><\/a>, and each one lasted for 6 seconds.<\/p>\n<section class=\"textbox connectIt\">\n<h3>Experimental Conditions<\/h3>\n<p>There were seven conditions in the experiment.<\/p>\n<p>In three of the conditions, the woman held something in her hand as she experienced the painful thermal stimulation. She held either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The hand of her partner (who sat behind a curtain, and\u2014except for his hand\u2014was not visible).<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The hand of a male stranger (who was also behind a curtain).<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An object: a squeeze ball.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In three other conditions, the woman looked at a picture on a computer screen in front of her. She saw either:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A picture of her partner taken while the woman was being prepared for the experiment.<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A picture of a male stranger (similar age and matched for ethnicity with the woman\u2019s partner).<\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">An object: a picture of a chair.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>One control (or baseline) condition:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The woman looked at a fixation cross on the computer screen.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The figure below shows summarizes the organization (technically, the \u201cdesign\u201d) of the experiment.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7343\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7343\" style=\"width: 1281px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7343 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24224918\/loveandpain.png\" alt=\"There are two independent variables and six conditions for this experiment. The girl either held the hand of her partner, of a stranger, or held an object (a rubber ball), or looked at a picture of her partner, a stranger, or an object (a chair). There was also a control condition in which the participant viewed a fixation for a cross control condition.\" width=\"1281\" height=\"363\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7343\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><em>[Click to open in a new tab.]\u00a0<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/section>\n<h3>Procedure<\/h3>\n<p>The woman received twelve thermal stimulations in each condition. The order of presentation of conditions was randomized for each woman.<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"The randomization procedure was a bit more complicated than this explanation suggests. See the original paper if you want to know exactly what they did.\" id=\"return-footnote-615-4\" href=\"#footnote-615-4\" aria-label=\"Footnote 4\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[4]<\/sup><\/a> There was a 20-second break between stimulations. After each stimulation, the subject rated how \u201cuncomfortable\u201d the stimulus was on a 21-point scale.<\/p>\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"ohm4375\" class=\"resizable\" src=\"https:\/\/ohm.one.lumenlearning.com\/multiembedq.php?id=4375&theme=lumen&iframe_resize_id=ohm4375&source=tnh&show_question_numbers\" width=\"100%\" height=\"550\"><\/iframe><\/section>\n<h3>Results<\/h3>\n<p>To take account of individual differences, the control condition (i.e., looking at a fixation cross on a computer screen) the experimenters found the difference between each person\u2019s average control condition unpleasantness rating and her rating for each condition. For example, imagine that one participant has the following average \u201cunpleasantness\u201d ratings (on the 21-point scale):<a class=\"footnote\" title=\"As any doctor will tell you, getting a valid and reliable rating of pain is notoriously difficult. Master and her colleagues used a scale (the Gracely Box Scale) that is widely used in research and has been extensively validated.\" id=\"return-footnote-615-5\" href=\"#footnote-615-5\" aria-label=\"Footnote 5\"><sup class=\"footnote\">[5]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7346\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7346\" style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7346\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/24225349\/loveandpain21.png\" alt=\"The results from one person's pleasantness ratings. When her partner\u2019s hand she scored a 9. When holding a stranger\u2019s hand, 14, and when holding an object, 12. When viewing her partner's picture, she scored an 8, when viewing a stranger \u2019s picture she scored 11, and when viewing an object she scored a 11. The control condition scored a 10.\" width=\"450\" height=\"239\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7346\" class=\"wp-caption-text\"><strong>Figure 1<\/strong>. Imagine these are the unpleasantness ratings given by a participant. According to their results, they found the most unpleasant pain experience was while holding a stranger&#8217;s hand or by holding an object. Holding their partner&#8217;s hand or looking at a picture of their partner was only slightly better than the control of looking at a cross on the computer screen.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>The control rating (10) is then subtracted from each of the treatment ratings. This becomes the score that is analyzed (called a \u201cdifference score\u201d). This method allows each woman to have a different general pain level (in the example, it is \u201c10\u201d but another person might have \u201c6\u201d or \u201c12\u201d as her average). The difference score looks at each person\u2019s change from her personal baseline under the various conditions.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_7674\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7674\" style=\"width: 450px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-7674\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/28172222\/loveandpain3a.png\" alt=\"A participant's ratings as compared to the original control rating which was 10. The difference between the control score and the different condition scores are as follows: when holding her partner's hand, the score is negative 1, when holding a stranger\u2019s hand the difference is positive 4 , and when holding an object the difference between the pleasantness score and the control score is positive 2. It is negative 2 when viewing her partner's picture, positive 1 when looking at a stranger and positive1 when looking at an object.\" width=\"450\" height=\"239\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7674\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Figure 2. Here you see the participant&#8217;s pain ratings once all of their ratings are compared with their control condition.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>For the difference scores, a positive number means that the experience in that condition was <em>more<\/em> painful than it was in the control condition. A negative number means that the experience in that condition was <em>less<\/em> painful than it was in the control condition. The exact number used indicates how much more or less painful the experience was.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\">\n<h3>Try It<\/h3>\n<p>Before we show you the actual results of the experiment, we\u2019d like you to predict what you think happened in this experiment. Use the figure below. The zero baseline is the control condition. Your predictions are about the six treatment conditions. You can click and drag on a bar to move the bar up, if you think that condition was more painful for the subject than the baseline control. And you can move a bar down if you think that condition was less painful than the baseline control condition.<\/p>\n<p>The initial screen below shows all six of the treatment conditions as a tiny bit more painful than the baseline control. Make your predictions based on your own theory about the possible positive or negative effects of holding the hands of a person you love or of a stranger, or looking at a picture of a person you love or a stranger while you are in pain. Remember that zero baseline control is still very painful, so zero does not mean that there is no pain.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/oerfiles\/Psychology\/interactives\/love_pain.html\" width=\"650\" height=\"400\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><\/div>\n<div class=\"wp-nocaption \"><\/div>\n<div class=\"qa-wrapper\" style=\"display: block\"><button class=\"show-answer show-answer-button collapsed\" data-target=\"q585162\">Click here to see the actual results of the study.<\/button><\/p>\n<div id=\"q585162\" class=\"hidden-answer\" style=\"display: none\">\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-5022 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com\/courses-images\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/855\/2017\/09\/23190547\/image1-1.png\" alt=\"Actual results show that holding hands of a partner reduced pain by .5, but holding hands with a stranger increased it by 1.5 and holding an object increased to almost 1. Looking at a picture of a partner reduced pain by 1, looking at a picture of a stranger increased it by .25 and looking at an object increased pain by .1.\" width=\"406\" height=\"240\" \/><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<section class=\"textbox tryIt\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"ohm4376\" class=\"resizable\" src=\"https:\/\/ohm.one.lumenlearning.com\/multiembedq.php?id=4376&theme=lumen&iframe_resize_id=ohm4376&source=tnh&show_question_numbers\" width=\"100%\" height=\"550\"><\/iframe><\/section>\n<section class=\"textbox interact\">Let&#8217;s use these results to rank the order of the conditions in terms of their effect on pain. Drag the condition name on the right into the appropriate box next to the rank order number on the left. <iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/lumenlearning.h5p.com\/content\/1290477388969288438\/embed\" width=\"1088\" height=\"762\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\" data-mce-fragment=\"1\"><\/iframe><script src=\"https:\/\/lumenlearning.h5p.com\/js\/h5p-resizer.js\" charset=\"UTF-8\"><\/script><\/section>\n<h3>Conclusions<\/h3>\n<p>These results suggest that there is something special about a person we love\u2014or at least someone we like. Dr. Master noted that looking at a picture of a loved one may be slightly more beneficial than holding his hand, though this difference did not quite reach statistical significance. Holding a stranger\u2019s hand exaggerated the pain experience by a considerable amount, so it is clear that (in the context of this experiment) human contact alone is not enough to relieve pain.<\/p>\n<p>Dr. Master makes a practical suggestion: If you are going to have a painful medical procedure, bringing a picture of someone you love may be helpful in reducing the pain. In fact, based on a comparison of the hand-holding and picture-viewing conditions, you may actually be better off bringing a picture than bringing the actual person to the painful procedure.<\/p>\n<p>Here is her final conclusion: \u201cIn sum, these findings challenge the notion that the beneficial effects of social support come solely from supportive social interactions and suggest that simple reminders of loved ones may be sufficient to engender feelings of support.\u201d If you think back to the introduction to this activity, we said that our goal was to find out how and why social support leads to better health outcomes. As we cautioned you, this experiment doesn\u2019t even come close to answering that question. However, it does take us one little step in the right direction, suggesting that \u201csocial support\u201d may be more complicated than just having people near us or even a group of friends. \u201cSocial support\u201d may involve triggering certain cognitive (mental) processes, such as memories and emotions, that are associated with strong positive relationships. That is for future research to clarify.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"before-footnotes clear\" \/><div class=\"footnotes\"><ol><li id=\"footnote-615-1\">Sarah Master was then a graduate student at UCLA and is now a research associate with a Ph.D. at UCLA. Several of her co-authors are major figures in the field of health psychology. For example, co-author Shelly Taylor is one of the founders of the field of health psychology. <a href=\"#return-footnote-615-1\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 1\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-615-2\">Researchers must often decide between restricting the characteristics of their subjects to simplify factors influencing the results versus opening the experiment to a broader range of subjects to improve generalizability and representativeness. Restriction of the participants in this study to heterosexual couples does not imply that couples with other gender identities or sexual orientations are either unimportant or uninteresting.  <a href=\"#return-footnote-615-2\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 2\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-615-3\">Alternating among three different locations on different trials.  <a href=\"#return-footnote-615-3\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 3\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-615-4\">The randomization procedure was a bit more complicated than this explanation suggests. See the original paper if you want to know exactly what they did. <a href=\"#return-footnote-615-4\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 4\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><li id=\"footnote-615-5\">As any doctor will tell you, getting a valid and reliable rating of pain is notoriously difficult. Master and her colleagues used a scale (the Gracely Box Scale) that is widely used in research and has been extensively validated. <a href=\"#return-footnote-615-5\" class=\"return-footnote\" aria-label=\"Return to footnote 5\">&crarr;<\/a><\/li><\/ol><\/div>","protected":false},"author":20,"menu_order":29,"template":"","meta":{"_candela_citation":"[{\"type\":\"original\",\"description\":\"Psychology in Real Life: Love and Pain\",\"author\":\"Patrick Carroll for Lumen Learning\",\"organization\":\"\",\"url\":\"\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc-by\",\"license_terms\":\"\"},{\"type\":\"cc\",\"description\":\"holding hands\",\"author\":\"Will Milne\",\"organization\":\"Pexels\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.pexels.com\/photo\/diverse-diversity-hands-hold-302354\/\",\"project\":\"\",\"license\":\"cc0\",\"license_terms\":\"\"}]","pb_show_title":"on","pb_short_title":"","pb_subtitle":"","pb_authors":[],"pb_section_license":""},"chapter-type":[],"contributor":[],"license":[],"part":585,"module-header":"learn_it","content_attributions":[{"type":"original","description":"Psychology in Real Life: Love and Pain","author":"Patrick Carroll for Lumen Learning","organization":"","url":"","project":"","license":"cc-by","license_terms":""},{"type":"cc","description":"holding hands","author":"Will Milne","organization":"Pexels","url":"https:\/\/www.pexels.com\/photo\/diverse-diversity-hands-hold-302354\/","project":"","license":"cc0","license_terms":""}],"internal_book_links":[],"video_content":null,"cc_video_embed_content":{"cc_scripts":"","media_targets":[]},"try_it_collection":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/chapter"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7386,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/615\/revisions\/7386"}],"part":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/parts\/585"}],"metadata":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapters\/615\/metadata\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"chapter-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/pressbooks\/v2\/chapter-type?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"contributor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/contributor?post=615"},{"taxonomy":"license","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.one.lumenlearning.com\/introductiontopsychology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/license?post=615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}