Social modeling in pediatric pain

Families provide an important context in which pediatric pain should be understood, and previous research has shown that how parents react to pain can have an influence on how their children react to and experience pain. How children learn from their parent's modeling of pain behaviours may be influenced by the sex of the child and parent; however, the majority of pediatric pain research on parent-child interactions has only focused on mothers. The proposed study will examine the impact of watching a parent's reaction to pain on children's own pain experience. Two hundred and forty parent-child pairs (50% fathers) will each complete the cold pressor task (CPT), which is a safe and commonly used method of inducing mild to moderate levels of pain in the lab. Children will first watch their parent complete the CPT, and will then complete the CPT themselves. Parents will be randomly assigned to display a natural, exaggerated, or minimized pain expression during the CPT. The pain experience of the parent and child will be measured with self-reports of pain intensity, pain threshold and tolerance, as well as coding of their facial expressions. Analysis will examine whether the child's pain behaviour and reports of pain are influenced by the parent's behaviours pain behaviour, and whether this differs based on the sex of the parent and child. This research will help increase our understanding of the role of fathers in pediatric pain, which has been understudied to date. The results of this study will also contribute to explanations of how pain behaviours can be learned through social modeling by children from their parents, which will have clinical implications for family-based interventions.