Memory of dental pain.

The possibility that patients' memory for acute pain is reconstructed over time was tested by comparing the degree of pain remembered 3 months after a dental appointment with both expected and experienced pain, as reported immediately before and after the appointment. As hypothesised, there was a closer association between remembered and expected pain than between remembered and experienced pain, particularly for those patients who scored high on the Dental Anxiety Scale. These results suggest that the accuracy of patients' reports of pain experienced in the past may be suspect, and that dental anxiety may be slow to extinguish because the discrepancy between expected and experienced pain felt at one appointment may not be recalled accurately by anxious patients at their next appointment.