The defense response theory implies that individuals should respond to increasing levels of painful stimulation with correlated increases in affectively mediated psychophysiological responses. This paper employs structural equation modeling to infer the latent processes responsible for correlated growth in the pain report, evoked potential amplitudes, pupil dilation, and skin conductance of 92 normal volunteers who experienced 144 trials of three levels of increasingly painful electrical stimulation. The analysis assumed a two-level model of latent growth as a function of stimulus level. The first level of analysis formulated a nonlinear growth model for each response measure, and allowed intercorrelations among the parameters of these models across individuals. The second level of analysis posited latent process factors to account for these intercorrelations. The best-fitting parsimonious model suggests that two latent processes account for the correlations. One of these latent factors, the activation threshold, determines the initial threshold response, while the other, the response gradient, indicates the magnitude of the coherent increase in response with stimulus level. Collectively, these two second-order factors define the defense response, a broad construct comprising both subjective pain evaluation and physiological mechanisms.

We have used a combination of 30 serological, protein electromorphic, and DNA markers defining 28 loci to construct a linkage map of chromosome 1. These markers form a continuous linkage group of 320 cM in males and 608 cM in females; female genetic distances were on average twofold higher than those of males across the map. Among the DNA markers are 10 highly polymorphic markers reflecting loci that contain a variable number of tandem repeats, well distributed over the length of the chromosome, that will be highly efficient anchor points for application of this map to studies of human genetic disease.

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