Pain and Coping in The Religious Mind: Does Religion Provide Placebo Analgesia?

TY - CONF

T1 - Pain and Coping in The Religious Mind

T2 - The Placebo Effect? Advances in Research and Implications for Clinical Trials and Clinical Practice

AU - Jegindø, Else-Marie Elmholdt

AU - Geertz, Armin W.

AU - Roepstorff, Andreas

AU - Jensen, Troels Staehelin

PY - 2008

Y1 - 2008

N2 - Does religion provide placebo analgesia? The purpose of our project is to understand religious coping and specifically how it might be understood a coping strategy for religious people who experience pain. The project is an interdisciplinary study joining different faculties and academic institutions, i.e. the Religion, Cognition and Culture (RCC) research area at The Faculty of Theology, Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) and The Danish Pain Research Centre (DPRC) at the University of Aarhus and Aarhus University Hospital. The team will design fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiments and use experimental pain stimuli to assess how a target group of religious participants react to and experience pain during religious activities/stimuli, prayer and religious symbols. In addition, different biomarkers will be measured to register the somatic response of these activities (heart rate variability, blood pressure, cortisol and oxytocin levels). Questionnaires and short interviews will give us a further assessment of the pain experience of the participants, their religious beliefs and practices as well as their previous experience with religious coping strategies. We hypothesize that the target group will have a higher pain threshold and pain tolerance during religious practice compared to a non-religious control group, and the fMRI experiments are expected to show reduced neural activity (BOLD) in areas of the brain correlating with pain experience during personal prayer and religious stimuli (target) and increased neural activity in reward systems during personal prayer and religious stimuli (target). To complement the clinical experiments, field work in Mauritius during the Hindu Thaipusam Festival 2010 will explore how pain in an online ritual setting is experienced by the pilgrims engaging in extreme and intense religious practices. Furthermore, the social, cultural and historical contexts of the religious practices are expected to play an important role in setting the frame and interpreting the results. Conclusions: TBA

AB - Does religion provide placebo analgesia? The purpose of our project is to understand religious coping and specifically how it might be understood a coping strategy for religious people who experience pain. The project is an interdisciplinary study joining different faculties and academic institutions, i.e. the Religion, Cognition and Culture (RCC) research area at The Faculty of Theology, Centre of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience (CFIN) and The Danish Pain Research Centre (DPRC) at the University of Aarhus and Aarhus University Hospital. The team will design fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) experiments and use experimental pain stimuli to assess how a target group of religious participants react to and experience pain during religious activities/stimuli, prayer and religious symbols. In addition, different biomarkers will be measured to register the somatic response of these activities (heart rate variability, blood pressure, cortisol and oxytocin levels). Questionnaires and short interviews will give us a further assessment of the pain experience of the participants, their religious beliefs and practices as well as their previous experience with religious coping strategies. We hypothesize that the target group will have a higher pain threshold and pain tolerance during religious practice compared to a non-religious control group, and the fMRI experiments are expected to show reduced neural activity (BOLD) in areas of the brain correlating with pain experience during personal prayer and religious stimuli (target) and increased neural activity in reward systems during personal prayer and religious stimuli (target). To complement the clinical experiments, field work in Mauritius during the Hindu Thaipusam Festival 2010 will explore how pain in an online ritual setting is experienced by the pilgrims engaging in extreme and intense religious practices. Furthermore, the social, cultural and historical contexts of the religious practices are expected to play an important role in setting the frame and interpreting the results. Conclusions: TBA

M3 - Poster

Y2 - 14 August 2008 through 15 August 2008

ER -