Goals for coping with pain mitigate time distortion.

The cold pressor test was used to investigate the effect of specific versus nonspecific time-oriented goals on perception of time by a person experiencing pain. Headache pain has been shown to attenuate the retrospective estimates of time passage. In the present study, laboratory-induced (cold pressor) pain produced results congruent with those of a previous clinical report on headache. In addition, results indicated that giving a specific time goal for coping with pain minimized the time distortion. Time estimations of subjects in pain with a specified goal were found to be significantly longer (and more accurate) than time estimations of subjects who were in pain but not given a time-specific goal.