Pain-related and negative semantic priming enhances perceived pain intensity.

Background: Negative affective and pain-related cues, such as pictures or words, have been shown to act as primes and enhance the perceived intensity of subsequent painful events. For pain-related semantic primes, it remains unclear whether this effect depends on negative valence itself or, specifically, on the pain-relatedness of the words.

Objectives: To investigate the effect of pain-related, negative affective (pain-unrelated) and neutral semantic primes on the perception of subsequent noxious target stimuli.