Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Chronic pain often persists in the absence of ongoing tissue damage or identifiable pathology and is frequently experienced as automatic and unpredictable. These features suggest that pain responses may be established at a stage prior to conscious cognitive or behavioral regulation. This paper reexamines the onset of chronic pain from a learning theory perspective, focusing on classical conditioning and proposing a framework in which pain itself is conceptualized as an unconditioned response.In previous conditioning research, pain stimuli have commonly been treated as unconditioned stimuli, whereas pain as an unconditioned response has rarely been explicitly theorized. After reviewing this historical and theoretical background, the present paper argues that repeated associations between pain experiences and bodily sensations, movements, contexts, or internal states can lead to the reproduction of pain in the absence of nociceptive input, through conditioned responding.From this perspective, fear conditioning, avoidance behavior, safety learning, and cognitive factors are positioned not as the primary origin of chronic pain, but as processes that maintain and elaborate already-conditioned pain responses.By clarifying the learning-based origins of chronic pain that precede cognitive–behavioral mechanisms, this paper aims to extend existing models and provide a refined theoretical foundation for understanding the onset and persistence of chronic pain.
Author: Sonoda, Naoko
Language: Japanese
Subfield: Physiology (medical)
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7163289010