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Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2016

KEVIN REUTER ,
MARKUS WERNING ,
LARS KUCHINKE  and
ERICA COSENTINO
KEVIN REUTER*
Affiliation:
University of Bern
MARKUS WERNING
Affiliation:
Ruhr University Bochum
LARS KUCHINKE
Affiliation:
Ruhr University Bochum
ERICA COSENTINO
Affiliation:
Ruhr University Bochum
*
†Address for correspondence: Kevin Reuter, Institute of Philosophy, Unitobler, Länggassstraße 49a, 3012 Bern, Switzerland. Tel: +41 77 266 2091; e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like ‘syringe’, ‘wound’, ‘knife’, and ‘cactus’ are considered to be more pain-related for those who are more pain-sensitive. These findings dovetail with recent studies suggesting that certain bodily characteristics influence the way people form mental representations (Casasanto, 2009). We discuss three mechanisms which could potentially account for our findings: attention and memory bias, prototype analysis, and embodied cognition. We argue that, whereas none of these three accounts can be ruled out, the embodied cognition hypothesis provides a particularly promising view to accommodate our data.

Keywords

painsemantic processingbody-specificitypain-sensitivityembodied account
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , September 2017 , pp. 553 - 567
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Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2016 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank Alexander Errenst, Marcel Gimmel, Nina Poth, and Fahime Same for their support in constructing the set of stimuli and preparing the data for analysis.

References

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