IIT Bombay, Friborg, Zurich researchers say money rewards are less likely to improve mood if you are in pain

IIT Bombay, Friborg, Zurich researchers say money rewards are less likely to improve mood if you are in pain

University students who experience physical pain perform worse on tasks and have lower moods than those without pain.

FPJ Education DeskUpdated: Wednesday, May 04, 2022, 05:00 PM IST
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Research has shown that individuals diagnosed with long-term pain often experience a negative mood. Would it be the same with people whose pain is not severe enough to consult a doctor and get it diagnosed, that is, sub-clinical?

A research team comprising individuals from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT Bombay), University of Fribourg, Switzerland, , India, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and Harvard University, USA, collectively published an article about how cash rewards affect the mood of university students who experience a certain amount of pain everyday.

The researchers found that money as a reward does not improve mood in students with pain, indicating that pain has a negative effect on overall mood. This paper was published in the Humanities and Social Sciences Communication of Nature.

The study divided the sample of 79 students into two groups, one with participants not suffering from any pain and the second belonging to the sub-clinic population. Some of the types of pain experienced by people in the sub-clinical group were headaches, backaches, pain in the arms or legs, muscle cramps, and chest pains. The researchers used a method known as the Fribourg Reward Task, also used in similar studies earlier.

In previous research, it was noticed that individuals who have been diagnosed with long term pain perform poorly on such tasks. Their mood does not improve much after cash rewards compared to people without pain.

To assess the mood of the participants, they were asked to rate themselves on a scale from 0 indicating bad mood to 100 indicating good mood. However, they were shown a smiling face and a sad face instead of numbers.

The team also investigated whether the task’s difficulty affected the interaction between pain, mood response, and behaviour. While recruiting university students in Switzerland for the study, the researchers excluded individuals with a history of depression or other psychiatric disorders. The sub-clinical participants exhibited significant pain symptoms as reported by them on a questionnaire. The sub-clinical and no pain groups were further divided into two groups based on the difficulty of the task. All chosen participants had to do one task – either of low or high difficulty.

The results from the study were examined using statistical software. There was no significant difference seen in the mood of the group with no pain and the sub-clinical group before the trials were conducted. In addition to the previously stated hypothesis, the authors also expected that if participants get more money, their mood will be better. The analyses showed that participants who did not experience pain did indeed have higher average mood scores for the larger reward condition than smaller.

However, this was not observed in the sub-clinical pain group. There was no significant difference in mood depending on the reward. Additionally, the team observed that all participants were more accurate in the low difficulty task when compared to the high difficulty task.

“This study is the first of its kind to investigate how the reward-pain relationship works in a subclinical population.,” say the researchers. It gives valuable information on how pain affects reward processing without the additional effects of medicines. In terms of next steps, Professor Rashmi Gupta, Cognitive and Behavioural Neuroscience Lab, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Bombay, says they “plan to do the same study with the university students in India to explore the cross-cultural differences.”

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