Please use the form below to submit comments. Also provide an e-mail address and name. Your e-mail address and/or name will be used only to communicate with you about this or future comments you may submit. I am particularly keen to receive references to published material that contradicts the assertions and arguments I have made.
By submitting the above comment, I grant to Ross Alan Hangartner the right to incorporate the comment in full or in part, literally, paraphrased, or conceptually, as he sees fit, into State of Pain or other writings that he may create in the future. However, I don't grant permission to include my name or e-mail address, or to use them in any other way than to contact me for follow-up. I understand that by submitting the comment I acquire no right of any kind in State of Pain or other writings of Ross Alan Hangartner.
Last updated: Fri, Mar 21, 2025
In the earlier section How Pain Is Made, I described much of what today's neurophysiology has to teach us about pain. This includes the pain matrix, which goes a long way toward explaining the sensory experience of pain. The pain matrix idea, however, seems to be incomplete, in that it provides little understanding of the emotional aspect of pain.
In The Psychology of Pain I've described how psychologists (and, to some extent, psychiatrists) have understood the emotional and behavioral aspects of pain. While much such study has occurred, many of its ostensible findings seem to be short on empirical support and lacking in treatment efficacy.
Here I attempt to describe a better model of pain, one that handles both the sensory and emotional aspects of pain, and that is consistent with modern perspectives from affective neuroscience.
How is this model better?
It explains more pain phenomena without invoking concepts such as "adaptive" and "maladaptive." It explains pain not as a unique, failure-prone system, but as a variation on other well-understood neural systems. It integrates pain phenomena with other affective phenomena. It presents a somewhat-clear model for the nature and role of emotion in the pain experience.
I anticipate the objections. It is nothing new. We already know this. The psychological explanations that it implicitly rejects are "scientific." And so forth....
Nevertheless, make a stab at understanding how this model differs from the model that now has hegemony among not only pain clinicians and psychologists, but most of those who are involved in treating pain.
Within this section...
Phineas Gage and Brain Modularity (This page is incomplete.)
Motive, Behavior, and Learning (This page is incomplete.)
Motivation, Emotion, Cognition, and Memory (This page is incomplete.)
Pain in the Structured Brain (This page is incomplete.)
Or skip to...
The Experience of Chronic Pain (Last updated: Tue, Mar 11, 2025)