“It Hurts Red:” A Preliminary Study of Children's Perception of Pain

Abstract

Children's perception of pain was investigated in an exploratory study. Some synaesthetic aspects were examined such as the color of pain, texture, shape, pattern and continuous vs intermittent quality. A projective test was developed using cartoons to illustrate two situations in which children commonly experience pain, a self-administered hammer blow and a doctor-administered needle. Interviews were tape-recorded with 58 children in hospital outpatient clinics and school situations in Kindergarten and Grades 1 through 3 in Licking County, Ohio. Significantly more children perceived the pain of a needle as jagged rather than smooth, and the pain of a hammer blow as a continuous rather than on-and-off pain. A finding of interest is the consistently greater differentiation in synaesthetic perception by the younger group on four of the five variables. Synaesthetic perception may be more characteristic of children in Piaget's preoperational stage (aged 4–6); more cognitively oriented perception may be exhibited by 7- to 9-yr.-old children who approximate the stage of concrete operations.