What this means
The team built a computer tool that tracks plate heat, pain ratings, and hand pressure at once. It shows the tool can record these things, but it does not show which people feel pain more.
Plain-English summary written by an AI model from the abstract. The original is below.
- Who it was tested in
- 94 participants in a pilot study
- Kind of research
- A study
The science
- Original title
- Real-time assessment of temperature sensitivity, pain processing, and pain behavior across the lifespan: Integrating stimulus data, contact force, and subjective ratings.
- Authors
- Steinhoff HJ, Prenaj B, Kübel SL et al.
- Journal
- Behavior research methods
- Published
- Oct 14, 2026
- Study type
- Study · in humans
- PMID
- 42875602 ↗
Abstract
Assessments of temperature sensitivity and pain processing play an important role in psychological and psychiatry research, including with adolescent participants and across the lifespan. To ensure the validity and comparability of findings, experimental settings must be well tolerated and easily manageable for participants of all age groups and reliably monitored by the experimenter. These settings should promote reproducible procedures and support computer-assisted data acquisition and analysis to enable robust, efficient scientific evaluation. We present CAREST (Controlling and Recording Experiments in Sensitivity to Temperature), a PsychoPy-based tool for real-time assessment of temperature sensitivity, pain sensation, and pain response behavior via thermal induction. CAREST controls and communicates with a cold/hot plate and provides a touchscreen slider to assess pain sensation on a visual analog scale (VAS). The plate is placed on a platform with load cells to measure hand-plate contact force, providing an objective assessment of thermal contact between hand and plate surface during the experiment and participants' approach versus avoidance tendencies in response to pain. CAREST continuously and synchronously records timestamped values of plate surface temperature, participants' VAS ratings, and hand-plate contact force, enabling computation of several established and novel measures of pain sensitivity and related behavioral factors within a single experimental setting. In a pilot study with 94 participants, we examined heat and cold pain thresholds, intensities, tolerances, and hand-plate contact forces. The results highlight substantial heterogeneity in pain response behavior, with one out of five participants differing markedly from the modest average tendency toward pain avoidance.
Steinhoff HJ, Prenaj B, Kübel SL et al. Real-time assessment of temperature sensitivity, pain processing, and pain behavior across the lifespan: Integrating stimulus data, contact force, and subjective ratings. Behavior research methods. 2026. doi:10.3758/s13428-026-03192-w. PMID: 42875602. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/42875602/