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I also unfortunately was not able to come to class last week (but since I had a bad migraine all day I like to pretend that I was "studying" pain first hand.) What really interested me from the above posts was Emily's question: what if the individual differences in pain perception reflect neural differences rather than emotional differences?

I personally think that it's probably some combination of the two. It sounds like there was a good bit of evidence in class that altered mental states can alter pain perception. But I also think that changing your mental state with respect to pain does in fact change your neural state as well. I know from Wendy's pain class (and I don't know how much of this was talked about the other night) that there's some evidence that a person can exert top-down control to change the neural state. For example, if a person is in a mild amount of pain and they really need to direct their attention elsewhere, then a certain pattern of neural firing in specific brain structures will lead to activation of the endogenous opioid system. This seems to make sense to me given the knowledge that simply believing you're getting an active pain medication can lead to activation of the endogenous opioid system. So even changing your mental states can change your neural states. And since mental state varies from individual to individual, it makes sense that the neural state would vary across individuals just to reflect the mental states.

In thinking about individual differences about pain, I also keep thinking back to one of our lab projects over the summer (Kara's, actually) that used human participants. She was looking at pain in empathetic situations, and for each subject we ran a couple different pain tests. Each subject did a threshold test, a suprathreshold test, and an ice water bucket test. The threshold test consists of putting a probe on the subject's arm that heats up. The point where the temperature goes from just "hot" to "painful" was recorded. The suprathreshold test involved the probe heating up to a predetermined temperature (some were supposed to be very painful) and having the subject rate their pain. The ice water bucket was just that; subjects had to put their arm in ice water for 90 seconds and rate the intensity (physiological aspect) and unpleasantness (emotional aspect) on a scale every 20 seconds. My only point here is that we had to do all of these different tests because they all get at different aspects of pain that vary from individual to individual. One person isn't just sensitive or insensitive to all of the tests; it varies from test to test. The ice water bucket wasn't very painful at all for me, but I yelled at the experimenter who put the hot probe on my arm. This leads me to believe that there is something neural going on to account for individual difference, rather than just a state of mental toughness.