Myths
Babies do feel pain By Anne de Bruin, 2nd-year Psychology student Nowadays, it is hardly a question of whether babies can feel pain. Most of us even tend to say that babies are more easily hurt than adults. However, even as late as 1999, it was commonly stated and supported by research that infants up to one year of age could not consciously feel pain the way that we do [1]. The reactions babies gave to painful stimuli were interpreted as automatic responses rather than expressions of pain. The public opinion on this matter changed during the early years of the 21st century, but only in 2006 did research back this up. The Swedish Ph.D. student Marco Bartocci studied the patterns of supraspinal pain processing in infants and addressed babies’ experiences of painful stimuli. His study showed that painful and tactile stimuli influenced the blood circulation in infants’ somatosensory cortex, which implies the conscious sensory perception of pain [2]. As Marco Bartocci proved the conscious sensory perception of pain in babies, research conducted by Bellieni in 2012 shows us that we can recognize pain in newborns by looking at other markers as well. He differentiates between symptoms, which refer to conscious expressions, and signs, which are unconscious or involuntary expressions to pain. Examples of symptoms occurring when one experiences pain include the facial expression, body movements and sounds made. For babies, facial expressions of pain include features such as an open mouth and squeezed eyes. As for body movements, the activity of arms and legs are important indicators of pain. Sounds that go along with the experience of pain occur, of course, in the form of crying. The signs addressed by 32
Bellieni concern variations in heart rate and blood pressure, which both increase as a result of a painful experience. Furthermore, breathing changes and becomes more rapid, shallow or irregular. Lastly, the amount of stress hormones in the blood like cortisol and adrenaline increases [1]. All in all, when we combine the studies of Bartocci and Bellieni, which naturally are not the only researches pointing in this direction, it becomes clear that babies can indeed feel pain.
However, now that we know that babies can consciously feel pain and we saw how to recognize this through symptoms and signs, you might wonder why research used to say the opposite. Let’s take a closer look at the origins of infant pain denial. As mentioned before, babies’ responses to painful stimuli were mainly interpreted as a reflex, due to their lack of brain maturation. This was supported, for example, by research looking at the difference between reactions from two months old infants and children in later developmental stages. The fact that the younger children were not very successful in escaping from the pain stimulus would mean that they could not feel pain as well as the older children. A different contribution to infant pain denial came from Darwin’s theory. He compared children with animals, savages and primitives with only reflexive actions as their emotional expressions. These were considered less reliable markers of pain because they were reinforced by habits. A third important influence on this topic came from the psychological movement called Behaviorism, which exclusively focuses on observable behavior. From the point of view of the behaviorists, pain was simply a mechanical stimulus-response. Even a reflexive reaction to a certain possibly painful stimulus was considered irrelevant for the question of whether