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Last updated: Fri, Jun 30, 2017
Even if the science is technically perfect there is plenty of opportunity for error. I'll provide just one simple example to give you an idea of things to be watchful for. Researchers report that “negative emotional states...alter pain perception, with the largest effect on pain unpleasantness rather than the sensory-discriminative components of the sensation.”1 The researchers are referring to experiments in which subjects were placed in “negative emotional states” by looking at pictures of people grimacing, by listening to “unpleasant” music, or by smelling “unpleasant” odors. The subjects reported controlled painful stimulation as being more unpleasant after being exposed to these things.
I don't claim that such research is in any way incorrect or without value. What I want to point out is that the conditions that the researchers denote as “negative emotional states” are clearly different from what many people would have in mind as a “negative emotional state.” Experimenters must work with conditions that can be easily and reliably created in a lab. Clearly they can't create a generic or canonical form of negative emotional state.
The potential error can occur when we summarize or interpret the results, and it is hard to think about them without doing that. The reality that the evidence is about several specific contrived situations can become lost. In fact, I removed the authors' description of the negative emotional states from the quote above and I imagine you didn't notice it (unless perhaps you looked up the source of the quotation ;). Simplifying and removing nuance are hard to avoid even when you are fairly determined to avoid them.
How far the specific manipulations that were experimentally tested should be generalized to real-world behaviors and to the common meaning of “negative emotional states” is subject to testing, and should be subjected to testing rather than simply assumed.
My feeling is that interpretation is a problem particularly when pain research deals with real-life impacts.