Pain: A Psychophysiological Analysis

By Richard A. Sternbach

Pain: A Psychophysiological Analysis focuses on the processes, mechanisms, and approaches in studying pain. The book first offers information on the problems of experimental pain and neurological activity. Topics include anxiety as an experimental variable, implications for experimental pain, pain stimuli, receptors, and fibers, dorsal roots and spinal cord, and sensory nerves. The text also ponders on physiological responses and overt pain behavior. Discussions focus on perceptual, cognitive, personality, family, and ethnic factors, aggression, adaptation and rebound, stress, and pain-specific responses. The publication takes a look at affective descriptions and insensitivity to pain. Concerns include interpersonal aspects of pain, subjective responses to pain, psychodynamics of pain responses, personality development without pain, and possible neural defects. Phantom pain and hypnotic and placebo effects are also elaborated. The manuscript is a vital source of data for psychiatrists, neurologists, psychologists, and physiologists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academic Press
• Release date: Sep 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483277295

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