PAIN LANGUAGE AND GENDER DIFFERENCES WHEN DESCRIBING A PAST PAIN EVENT

Abstract

Pain is a highly subjective experience that is challenging to describe to others and that depends heavily on words. So understanding and evaluating another person's pain requires an understanding of how they describe their pain. According to an expanding corpus of studies, men and women experience pain differently. However, few studies have looked at gender differences in the language used to describe pain, where gender is understood in both the biological and the social senses. The goal of this descriptive and analytical study was to investigate how men and women employed different vocabulary to describe remembered painful events. For the sake of perceiving the general understanding of this phenomenon, fifty university and college students were asked to respond to an online generated and distributed questionnaire. For the in-depth comprehension of how individuals of both genders perceive pain, face-to-face interactive sessions were held with twenty students. The resulting response rate of female participants was noticeably higher than male participants and it was eventually proved that females are more likely to communicate their pain in detail. This research also proved that there is indeed a difference between the pain language used by men and women.