Brief treatment of children's dental pain and anxiety.

Pain interferes with children's dental care, but anxiety and pain are often confounded. We tested a classical-conditioning model of dental pain with 45 8- to 11-yr.-old children but found little support for it. Instead, different treatments for pain were effective in reducing the children's expectations of discomfort. Expected discomfort may be the most important part of dental pain, so expectations might well be the focus of such treatments.