>>16054700That's how they described the study's methodology. I imagine the study itself is more comprehensive. My question was regarding sample size, because in the book, at least referencing this study on these few pages, they only referred to Patient A and Patient B. I'll look the actual study up on Scihub later, maybe after I'm done typing replies for today. More similar experiments may have been done (should have, actually) to verify the results, too, so there could be more research on this topic now.
>what if you put someone in a procedure that lasted hours, in which for the most of it they experienced a low amount of pain, but every now and then they had a couple or so minutes of intense pain.Interesting question. I think at that point, the duration would start to affect the participants' experiences. Like you mentioned, the constant fear and anticipation from the hours-long proceduce is something that simply couldn't be experienced by the individual who had a few minutes of intense pain. However, I think a complication is that this construction of the experiment introduces an additional dimension: fear. By intentionally inducing a sense of dread in the participants, now researchers should consider individuals' evaluation of the fear itself, because if both groups reported the same rating for the overall experience, it'd be difficult to discern how much of an effect the fear played in diminishing the experience. You posited the first group would report a far worse experience, and while I think I'd agree they'd have a worse experience, I don't know that the second group would report a better experience. The group of the relatively swift yet constant, intense pain wouldn't be comparing their experience to anyone else, they'd just say the pain was intense. And, because they don't know about the hours-long group, they wouldn't even consider their intense pain to be swift. charlim
