Interpersonal Transactions and Responses to Cold Pressor Pain among Australian Women and Men

This study was designed to assess how interpersonal transactions affect responses to painful stimulation among Australian women and men. Participants were 69 women and 49 men, randomly assigned to a No Transaction (NT) condition (coping alone) or one of three experimenter-initiated transactions (Distraction, Pain-Monitoring, Re-interpretation). Significant sex × transaction interactions for pain tolerance and reported pain revealed that pain responses of men did not differ as a function of transaction. However, women who coped alone had significantly less tolerance and more pain than men and women in other groups. In contrast, women engaged in re-interpretation transactions fared better on measures of pain perception than women engaged in distraction transactions, and they reported significantly less catastrophizing than did men in the re-interpretation condition. Together, findings replicate and extend recent evidence that suggests that women’s responses to noxious stimuli vary considerably as a result of interpersonal context.