This is a small section, just detailing the equipment we use in our daily work to ensure our research is of the highest and most consistent quality that we can achieve. Pain is an incredibly personal and variable subject to study. If I stub my toe, and say that on a scale from 0-10 it caused me a 7, it is very hard to truly empathise with what I mean by this. Those with sensitive toes may report a 10, whereas a hardened chronic toe-stubber may shrug it off with a 2. What’s more, perhaps I stub my toe one month later. During this month, I’ve won a multi-million pound grant, bought three puppies and Nigel Farage is entering his second week of being stuck in a public toilet. There is every chance that even though it’s the same toe, and the same person, I am now much less fazed by this injury. I may report a 2. There are many less flippant examples of the variability of pain, but the variability across time, person, mood, personality, experience (etc) hopefully illustrates how tricky it can be to reliably and consistently quantify pain..
The reason for this preamble is to highlight how crucial it is to have faith in the reliability of our equipment. Psychologists know beyond all doubt that humans vary; in many ways this is why we got into our respective fields of psychological research. But knowing that the variability in our data is not due to variations in scientific equipment is critical in ensuring our conclusions are focused on the humans and not error in measurement.
With this in mind, please continue below for a brief overview of the CINN Pain Lab’s equipment. Once again, please feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions, queries, suggestions or ideas about any of the details described below.