Gender differences in the nonverbal communication of pain: A new direction for sex, gender, and pain research?

摘要

1. Introduction: There are sex and gender differences in pain, which requires a biopsychosocial approach to fully understand and manage it [16,17]. Progress has been made in isolating the biological and psychological mechanisms, but less is known about social factors [7,35,36]. Fortunately, our understanding of contextual processes in pain, and more generally in health and the neurosciences, is developing [13,22,48,63]. The purpose of this topical review is to illustrate how we can draw on this knowledge to develop new directions for sex, gender, and pain research. It will focus on nonverbal behaviours, demonstrating that there are relevant gender differences in interpersonal communication. From this, I propose that the field of sex, gender, and pain can be enriched by adopting a nonverbal framework, and seek to understand the influence of such behaviours on the pain experiences of men and women.