Stress inoculation for pain: What's really going on?

Previous research demonstrated the efficacy of coping-skills training in stress inoculation for pain. An attempt was made in the present study to isolate the active ingredients of the coping-skills component, which consists of three categories of skills derived from Melzak's gate-control theory of pain: sensory discriminative (SD), motivational affective (MA), and cognitive evaluative (CE). Eighty-one undergraduate females were pretested on the cold pressor, randomly assigned to one of nine treatment conditions, and then posttested. Relaxation training (an SD procedure) produced increased tolerance, whereas distraction and imagery training (an MA procedure) resulted in higher threshold scores. Although the experimental conditions did not generate differential demand characteristics, two checks on independent variable manipulation revealed that SD skills are learned and employed, MA skills are already known but refined, and CE skills are largely ignored.