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Orthopaedic Proceedings
Vol. 100-B, Issue SUPP_2 | Pages 9 - 9
1 Feb 2018
Serbic D Ferguson L Smith M Thomas G Pincus T
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Purpose of the study and background

Although pain is usually described as a private experience, how pain is understood and responded to by others is important. A crucial feature of this process is empathy. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between empathy for pain and observers' health anxiety and fear of pain. The role of the observer's sex and age were also examined.

Methods and results

In this study 159 participants (73 males, mean age=41, SD=19.6) were presented with 16 images of individuals in pain (8 female, 8 male), and subsequently rated their empathy towards them. Participants then completed the fear of pain and health anxiety measures. Both fear of pain and health anxiety were positively associated with empathy for pain, but in the regression model only fear of pain was a significant positive predictor of empathy for pain (p< .001). Further analysis revealed that when controlling for the effects of fear of pain, the correlation between health anxiety and empathy became non-significant. The same results were found when the overall empathy for pain score was split into empathy for male and female images. Observers' sex and age were not significant predictors of empathy for pain.