The Relationship between Behavioral and Mood Responses to Monetary Rewards in a Sample of Indian Students with and without Reported Pain

Abstract

Abstract Physical pain has become a major health problem among university students; many are affected by it each year worldwide. Several studies have examined the prevalence of pain-related impairments in reward processing in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) countries and very often fail to replicate findings in non-western cultural settings. Here, we aimed to investigate the prevalence of physical pain symptoms in a sample of university students in India and replicate our previous study conducted on university students in Switzerland that showed reduced mood and behavioral responses to reward in students with significant pain symptoms. We divided the students into a sub-clinical group (N = 40) and a control group (N = 48) to test the influence of pain symptoms on reward processes. We used the Fribourg reward task and the pain sub-scale of the Symptom Checklist (SCL-27-plus) to assess the physical symptoms of pain. We found that 45% of the students reported high levels of physical symptoms of pain and interestingly, our ANOVA results did not show any significant interaction between reward and the groups neither for mood scores nor for the outcomes related to performance. These results might yield the first insights that pain-related impairment is not a universal phenomenon and can vary across cultures.