University of Birmingham

Graduate Student, School of Psychology

Doctoral Researcher

Psychology

Thesis Title: Personality's interaction with the pain experience

About

My research intends to comprehensively investigate the effect personality traits have on an individual’s pain experience. Currently no research has broadly identified key personality traits that alter your pain experience. Neuroticism and Extraversion have been studied independently, predominantly with patients undergoing surgery or painful exploratory procedures. Whilst these two personality traits are two of the most widely researched there is a key deficit in studying traits like paranoia, depression and hysteria with healthy individuals. Research also needs to investigate whether these traits affect cognitive or affective components to pain, which may be crucial when applying these findings towards pain coping methods and therapy.
Research will build upon previous findings and test participant’s pain tolerances and thresholds whilst completing pain induction tasks using two methods frequently utilised in the Pain lab: the Contact Heat-Evoked Potential Stimulator (CHEPS) and the Cold Pressor. Also participant’s responses to Offset Analgesia and the Rubber Arm Illusion will be recorded. The findings of these four tasks will be compared to participant’s scores on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Results of these experiments will highlight correlations between various personality traits and pain.
This experiment could then be completed with functional pain patients to investigate personality links between participants and also whether their results mirror those found with healthy controls.
Participants who posses these key personality traits will then complete affective and cognitive tasks whilst receiving a noxious stimulus. Findings will indicate relationships between traits, affect and cognition.

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