What can speech tell us about pain?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: Pain experiences are subjective and can vary significantly between individuals, yet pain is universally communicated using speech. Analysis of speech itself may be clinically informative about pain. Speaking itself may also relieve pain as it does during basic vocalisations. Whether complex speech relieves pain is not known. Understanding speech when pain is being experienced and whether certain speech features are associated with general pain sensitivity holds promise for identifying pain markers. OBJECTIVES: We investigated the (1) effect of acute pain on speech characteristics, (2) effect of speech on pain intensity, and (3) association between pain-free speech characteris..