Pain is something nobody wants to endure, whether it is physical, mental, or emotional pain, they are all never fun to go through. Even though pain is no fun, without our body’s telling us we are experiencing pain, worse consequences can occur. For instance, if you roll over your ankle and end up spraining it, without our body's sending a message to our brain that we need to take care of our ankle, our sprained ankle will gradually get worse and not heal. With this being said, I completely agree that it is important you know when you are in pain, so the pain doesn’t get worse and it can be treated. Obviously there are difference cases of pain, from minor to extreme, like falling off your bike and getting a scrape on your leg to being in …show more content…
The way biological influences affect the way one experiences pain can be described through the gate-control theory created by psychologist, Ronald Melzack and biologist, Patrick Wall (Myers, Dewall, 2016). The gate-control theory shows that the spinal cord is comprised of small nerve fibers and larger fibers that includes a neurological “gate” which allows pain signals to be either blocked or passed onto the brain; it is blocked by the larger fibers and opened by the smaller nerve fibers (Myers, Dewall, 2016). Phantoms or in other words, hallucinations from deaf, blind, or other people with nerve damage are also biological influences toward pain. Continuing, psychological influences affecting pain include athletes who just play through the pain, no matter what the after effects could be and our memories of pain (Myers, Dewall, 2016). Our memories of pain would be overlooking the duration of pain, such as surgery; one would look at the most painful time of the event and the pain felt at the end (Stone et al., 2005). Social-cultural influences that affect how one reacts to pain would incorporate understanding someone else's pain, others in your presence during the time of pain, and our cultural way of life (Myers, Dewall, 2016). We seem to become conscious of pain when one is actually experiencing pain and once