No pain, no gain? Pain and perceived responsiveness in intimate relationships

Responsive intimate partners are essential for a good life because their ability to understand, validate, and care for each other fosters high quality relationships that improve happiness and health. Being a responsive partner requires the ability to have empathic responsiveness in intimate relationships (i.e., being aware of what one's partner is feeling), especially when relationships encounter difficulties and when one's own feelings may be clouded in moments of relationship conflict. This project explores conditions that impair partner responsiveness, focusing on a novel physiological factor, physical pain sensitivity, which may affect responsiveness to perceiving the feelings of one's partner. Because one's ability to perceive a partner's feelings is guided in part by one's own affective experiences (i.e., ability to empathize with them), conditions that reduce (e.g., taking an analgesic) or magnify (e.g., experiencing interpersonal conflict) one's own experience of pain could impair this process. In this project, two experiments focus on the role of physical pain sensitivity within romantic relationships, in which partners can experience conflict and social pain that makes understanding others’ thoughts and feelings more difficult. In these studies, administration of acetaminophen is expected to reduce physical pain sensitivity, which in turn should weaken responsiveness to others' feelings. The first experiment tests the role of reduced physical pain sensitivity on responsiveness for romantic partners during a conflict discussion, as well as conflict-induced distress, physiological reactivity, and aggressive behaviors. The second experiment extends the research to day-to-day use of pain relievers and couple conflict by having partners consume acetaminophen at home and measure the effects on real-life conflict-related perceptions of responsiveness, empathy, and aggressive behavior. Individuals who ingest acetaminophen should show less empathy and perceive their partners as less responsive, leading them to report more conflict-related distress, to be more physiologically reactive, and to be more aggressive. This work highlights the interpersonal consequences when pharmacologically reducing physical pain sensitivity. Overall, this project should improve our understanding of the role of physical pain when regulating empathy and responsiveness in intimate relationships, and these processes are vital in many interpersonal settings such as the classroom, workplace, and broader community. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.