| Budget Amount *help |
¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2000: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
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| Research Abstract |
In the first experiment of pain, we investigated the effect of anxiety and attention on ratings of pain, which was induced by mechanical pressure and electrocutaneous pulse trains. For pressure, in the condition of watching the arm under the safety instructions, the mean pain rating increased more rapidly, as a function of trial, than it did in other conditions. For electrical stimulation, in the condition of watching the funny program under the anxiety instructions, the pain rating increased as a function of trial, whereas in the other conditions, it decreased as a function of trial. We proposed a tentative model, which is based on the discrepancy between the subject's anticipation of noxious stimuli before experiencing pain and the visual experience of it while experiencing pain.
In the second experiment of pain, we used warm (heat) and cold stimuli and produced warm and cold scales and pain scales. The power exponent of warm scale was 3.12 and that of cold scale was 1.77. The slope of warm (heat) pain scale was steeper than that of cold one.
In the experiments to measure vibrotactile thresholds, tangential vibrations to the skin were used and mechanoreceptive mechanisms was investigated to produce the tangential-threshold curve. Three experiments were performed. The shape of the threshold curve for the tangential vibrations was different from the shape for the normal ones. When the stimulus frequency was between 100 and 500 Hz, the normal-and tangential-threshold curves were similar to each other, and both of them were U-shaped. Below 50 Hz, however, the slope of the tangential-threshold curve was steeper than that of the normal one. It was supposed from the results of Experiments that the SA II determines the shape of the tangential-threshold curve when the stimulus frequency was lower than 50 Hz.
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