关键词: 社会体验, 观察学习, 社会比较, 疼痛应对, 疼痛耐受性

Abstract: Based on social learning and social comparison theories, the authors investigated whether the exposure to the successful or miserable lives of others could influence participants’ pain tolerance. Results consistently showed that people who were exposed to the successful or miserable lives of others reported higher tolerance of pain than people who were exposed to the ordinary lives of others. This result was present across different samples (employee sample in Experiment 1, and university student samples in Experiment 2), different priming methods (story of a waiter’s experience in Experiment 1, and a student’s life in Experiment 2). All these findings suggest that people can adaptively select different paths to regulate themselves in order to cope with pain.

Key words: social experience, observational learning, social comparison, coping with pain, pain tolerance