No pain, no social gains: A social-signaling perspective of human pain behaviors

Core Tip

Core tip: This article introduces a social-signaling perspective of pain and pain empathizing behaviors, which hypothesizes that both exogenous and endogenous pain percepts evolved as part of more general expressive heuristics for demonstrating basic trait impressions (e.g., empowerment vs vulnerability cues) to different types of affiliates. Prototypical sex differences in pain sensitivity/empathizing may then reflect specialized expressive styles for regulating distinct relationship dynamics throughout humans’ natural history. We show how the perspective accounts for several findings on how social contextual factors (e.g., audience characteristics) and how structural and functional components of the individual’s social network appear to influence contemporary pain expression.