ABSTRACT

Most people agree that, in general, pain is bad and should be avoided when the pain is not necessary for the achievement of some future benefit. In this chapter, after reviewing the importance of understanding the affective dimension of pain, the author describes what is known about this dimension of pain in other species. Ultimately, he argues, the main impediment to progress in understanding the unpleasantness of pain is the lack of a sufficiently detailed investigation of cases where humans report feeling pains without finding them unpleasant. Many pain researchers use the term "affective-motivational" to describe the pathway involved in unpleasantness, which implies that this pathway also underlies the motivational urge associated with pain. Since pain research on nonhuman animals has been a large target of research, one might hope that there would be a great deal of research to draw upon to learn about the unpleasantness of pain.