Behavioural/facial markers of pain, emotion, cognition

Abstract

Behavioural/facial markers of pain refer to a variety of responses that typically accompany the experience of pain. They serve the purpose to communicate the inner state “pain” to others and thus play a crucial role in social interactions. Moreover, they can also serve the purpose to protect affected body areas from pain and hereby promote healing. This chapter will give an overview of these behavioural markers of pain, with a specific focus on facial activity. Descriptions on what these responses look like, how they can be analysed, which aspects of pain they encode and how they can be differentiated from behavioural responses to other types of emotional affective states will be given. Moreover, since behavioural markers of pain are of special importance in patients with cognitive impairments (who are often not able to report about their pain), the impact of cognition on behavioural responses to pain will be discussed.