Do people use more words and gestures when pain is more intense?

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Effective pain communication is essential for providing adequate treatment and support. People often communicate pain through speech, nonverbal behaviors such as facial expressions, and co-speech gestures: bodily movements, primarily of the hands and arms, that accompany speech and can convey semantic information.

Previous research suggests that nonverbal pain behaviors increase with pain intensity, but it was unknown whether the same applies to speech and co-speech gestures. This experimental study explored whether higher pain intensity is associated with more speech and gestures during face-to-face communication about acute experimental pain.

The 26 participants experienced experimentally induced pressure pain at the fingernail bed at high and low intensities and took part in video-recorded semi-structured interviews. They rated the more intense pain as harder to communicate (t(25) = 2.21, p = .037), yet gave significantly longer verbal pain descriptions and made more co-speech gestures in the high-intensity condition (words: t(25) = 3.57, p = .001; gestures: t(25) = 3.66, p = .001).

The findings suggest that spoken and gestural communication about pain is enhanced when pain is more intense. Beyond conveying detailed semantic information about pain, speech and co-speech gestures may also provide a cue to pain intensity, with implications for the treatment and support pain sufferers receive. Future work should examine whether these findings apply to clinical interactions about pain.