Memory for acute pain experience is specifically inaccurate but generally reliable

Sixty patients having their wisdom teeth removed under general anaesthetic were tested immediately after surgery and 2 weeks later. Subjects completed versions of the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) and the UWIST Mood Adjective Checklist (UMACL). At the second test they were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups and either cued for their mood experience, cued for their pain experience or asked to recognise those words which they had chosen on the first occasion. Forty-nine patients completed the study. Accuracy of remembering was measured using Cohen's kappa (kappa) as a measure of agreement over the 2 tests. In general, accuracy of remembering was only 'fair' for both mood and pain (kappa = 0.5). Contrary to expectation cueing did not improve specific recognition, e.g., cueing for pain did not improve memory for pain words. However, there was evidence that memory of mood was more accurate when patients were cued to remember their pain. There was also evidence of a shift in the hedonic tone of the remembered mood; patients remembered their mood as being more negative than it actually was.