Two important influences on pain underestimation by health care professionals were investigated by varying specific cues with reference to underestimation of patients' pain: when observers are not allowed to talk to patients and when observers expect social cheating. One hundred and twenty health care professionals watched videotaped facial expressions of pain patients and estimated their pain. The first group only saw the faces, the second group was given patients' self-reports in addition and the last group was given a context cue priming them to expect cheating in addition to faces and patients' ratings. Health care professionals generally underestimated patients' pain, but this varied depending on the cues given. Those viewing the face without patients' ratings underestimated pain to a greater extent than health care professionals provided with patients' ratings. Health care professionals primed to expect cheating underestimated pain as much as those seeing only patients' faces. Therefore, both accounts, verbal report as important but missing cue as well as an alerted cheating detection device, could account for underestimation.

BackgroundPain is common in people with dementia, yet identification is challenging. A number of pain assessment tools exist, utilizing observation of pain-related behaviours, vocalizations and facial expressions. Whilst they have been developed robustly, these often lack sufficient evidence of psychometric properties, like reliability, face and construct validity, responsiveness and usability, and are not internationally implemented. The EU-COST initiative “Pain in impaired cognition, especially dementia” aims to combine the expertise of clinicians and researchers to address this important issue by building on previous research in the area, identifying existing pain assessment tools for dementia, and developing consensus for items for a new universal meta-tool for use in research and clinical settings. This paper reports on the initial phase of this collaboration task.MethodsAll existing observational pain behaviour tools were identified and elements categorised using a three-step reduction process. Selection and refinement of items for the draft Pain Assessment in Impaired Cognition (PAIC) meta-tool was achieved through scrutiny of the evidence, consensus of expert opinion, frequency of use and alignment with the American Geriatric Society guidelines. The main aim of this process was to identify key items with potential empirical, rather than theoretical value to take forward for testing.Results12 eligible assessment tools were identified, and pain items categorised according to behaviour, facial expression and vocalisation according to the AGS guidelines (Domains 1 – 3). This has been refined to create the PAIC meta-tool for validation and further refinement. A decision was made to create a supporting comprehensive toolkit to support the core assessment tool to provide additional resources for the assessment of overlapping symptoms in dementia, including AGS domains four to six, identification of specific types of pain and assessment of duration and location of pain.ConclusionsThis multidisciplinary, cross-cultural initiative has created a draft meta-tool for capturing pain behaviour to be used across languages and culture, based on the most promising items used in existing tools. The draft PAIC meta-tool will now be taken forward for evaluation according to COSMIN guidelines and the EU-COST protocol in order to exclude invalid items, refine included items and optimise the meta-tool.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12883-014-0229-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Facial expression of pain has rarely been researched in the context of facial expression of negative emotions with which it may occur. The main aim of the study was to investigate how pain expression resembled or differed from that of other negative emotions (fear, anger, sadness, surprise, disgust and embarrassment), using multidimensional scaling, a dimensional approach to understanding relationships among emotions. As possible misidentification of facial expressions by participants could distort those results, a judgement study as a categorical approach was conducted to examine the accuracy of identification of pain and negative emotion facial expressions. The sample was health care professionals. Identification of pain was good (unbiased hit rate 58.8%), but less than all other negative emotions. Confidence in ratings approximated accuracy of identification. Multidimensional scaling revealed two dimensions: the first distinguished embarrassment from all other emotion expressions; the second separated pain, sadness and anger from fear, surprise and disgust. Possible explanations for these findings were sought in patterns of facial action units, and in the messages conveyed by the expressions according to Fridlund's Behavioural Ecology View.

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