Book Description

Lord Kelvin (William Thompson) “To measure is to know.” “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” Pain has proven elusive to definitive measurement in research and clinical settings. While the experience is familiar to virtually everyone, it also is recognized as complex and multidimensional. Critiques of the field advise that pain is often unrecognized, inadequately assessed and underestimated. Unidimensional scales relying upon self-report are commonly used both clinically and in research settings, but they are vulnerable to presentation bias and they fail to capture the complexity of this multidimensional phenomenon. In consequence, there has been considerable interest and effort devoted to the generation of measures capable to capturing the experience for both research and clinical purposes. Both behavioral and physiological approaches have been pursued. Verbal behavior is represented by self-report scales that vary in dimensionality, typically seeking to represent sensory, affective and cognitive features of the experience. The status of self-report scales as the gold standard for pain assessment has been questioned. Nonverbal measures seek to capture behavioral activity ranging from facial expression through limb movements and gestures to posture. Physiological measures are similarly wide-ranging capitalizing on recent developments in brain imaging and novel approaches to autonomic regulation. There also are efforts to fuse behavioral and physiological measures as a means of capturing the complexity of pain. This series of papers seeks to represent the most recent conceptual and empirical advances in the important and rapidly advancing field of pain assessment and measurement. We invite both reviews of the literature and research investigations advancing the field.