ABSTRACT
Despite their roots in antiquity, pain research and pain control are relatively young fields. Over the past 2 decades considerable interest has developed in pain phenomena among investigators of various affiliations. Unfortunately, however, the bulk of this work has assumed a largely applied, atheoretical, sometimes even an ad hoc character. Although theoretical models have been suggested, they were neither detailed nor heuristic enough to leave a major impact on empirical research. As systematic knowledge rarely advances by single discoveries of sporadic nature, the lack of a unifying, broadly agreed upon theoretical formulation has adversely affected the work on pain. The present chapter proposes a novel approach. Specifically, this endeavor is based on a methodical attempt to spell out explicitly the implications for the domain of pain of a general model of psychological composition—Norman Anderson's (1981, 1982) functional measurement or integration of information theory. A feature for which the present approach, prematurely perhaps, has been dubbed a “functional theory of pain” (Algom, Raphaeli, & Cohen-Raz, 1986). Beyond integrating known results and observations, it offers new areas of inquiry, reducing many qualitative features of pain to quantitative (and hence testable) properties or hypotheses.
