Animal studies suggest that fear inhibits pain whereas anxiety enhances it; however it is unclear whether these effects generalize to humans. The present study examined the effects of experimentally induced fear and anxiety on radiant heat pain thresholds. Sixty male and female human subjects were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 emotion induction conditions: (1) fear, induced by exposure to three brief shocks; (2) anxiety, elicited by the threat of shock; (3) neutral, with no intervention. Pain thresholds were tested before and after emotion induction. Results suggest that findings from animal studies extend to humans: fear resulted in decreased pain reactivity, while anxiety led to increased reactivity. Pain rating data indicated that participants used consistent subjective criteria to indicate pain thresholds. Both subjective and physiological indicators (skin conductance level, heart rate) confirmed that the treatment conditions produced the targeted emotional states. These results support the view that emotional states modulate human pain reactivity.

This study evaluated the psychometric characteristics of the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; A. T. Beck, R. A. Steer, & G. K. Brown, 1996) in a primary care medical setting. A principal-components analysis with Promax rotation indicated the presence of 2 correlated factors, Somatic-Affective and Cognitive, which explained 53.5% of the variance. A hierarchical, second-order analysis indicated that all items tap into a second-order construct of depression. Evidence for convergent validity was provided by predicted relationships with subscales from the Short-Form General Health Survey (SF-20; A. L. Stewart, R. D. Hayes, & J. E. Ware, 1988). A receiver operating characteristic analysis demonstrated criterion-related validity: BDI-II scores predicted a diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD), as determined by the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD) Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ). This study demonstrated that the BDI-II yields reliable, internally consistent, and valid scores in a primary care medical setting, suggesting that use of the BDI-II in this setting may improve detection and treatment of depression in these medical patients.

These results are consistent with a motivational priming model that predicts that unpleasant affective states should enhance pain and that pleasant affective states should attenuate it.