Individuals in various cultures perceive and respond to pain differently. While early studies of acute pain have shown how cultural ideas of what is pain and how one should act in response to it varies, no one has yet discovered how culture influences perceptions of the intensity of pain in chronic sufferers. This research will analyze how individuals learn to respond to pain and how their social experience throughout their lives influences their attitudes, attention and past and present experience with pain. This in turn should affect how different cultures identify pain intensity. The student will work with 200 chronic pain patients from several ethnic groups at the Pain Control Center at the University of Massachusettes. She will test models of how culture affects the psychological and biological response to pain in each group. Chronic pain constitues a serious national health and economic problem. It is estimated that chronic pain affects thirty to forty million Americans and that the annual costs in health care, medicine, disability compensation, lost wages and other related costs is sixty to seventy billion dollars. This research will help alleviate this problem by increasing understanding of the role of culture in pain perception.
