Social Interaction and Pain Threshold in Virtual Reality

This experiment examined the effects of social presence and perceived location of a virtual environment on participants’ pain thresholds in a pre-registered, within-subjects experiment. First, we examined the effects of social interaction vs being alone in a virtual environment. Second, we compared a virtual environment representing a remote location to a replication of the lab environment. While the "location" of the virtual environment did affect social presence, such that participants reported greater social presence with participants who were co-located, location did not predict pain threshold. However, social interaction did predict increased pain threshold in the induced experimental thermal pain task. In other words, participants kept their hand on the hot thermode longer when interacting socially with another person. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of real-time social interaction in virtual reality as a distractor for experimental thermal pain, as well as the first to examine the potential interaction between social interaction and transportation to different virtual locations. While this task is not directly analogous to the experience of pain in a medical setting, this preliminary study indicates future avenues for patient treatment.