Study co-authored by Dr Lucía Macchia, Department of Psychology, has ramifications for countries’ pain reduction policies.
By Mr Shamim Quadir (Senior Communications Officer), Published (Updated )
It is well-established that the rich suffer less pain on average than the poor. However, much less is known about the factors that affect the size of the income gradient of pain.
A recent study from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and City, University of London used data from over one million adults from 127 countries worldwide to systematically test whether income inequality moderates the pain gap between the rich and the poor.
It found that pain is negatively associated with income in all but one of the countries (Angola) investigated. I.e. the higher your income, the less pain you are likely to experience. It also found strong evidence to suggest that an increase in income is much more protective against pain in countries where the income distribution is relatively more equal. But why?
The authors studied survey data from the Gallup World Poll (GWP) across the years 2009 to 2020. Specifically, data on respondents’ self-estimated annual income and to whether they had experienced pain in the day prior (yes or no response).
The use of the term ‘pain’ in this study relates to the feeling that people experience when their body hurts regardless of the presence of physical damage.
The data were passed through a variety of statistical models to search for links between respondents’ annual income and experience of pain, for the years and countries investigated.
The authors found statistically significant links between income and pain across the models, with results being robust to: using different measures of income inequality; removing outlying data points that could bias the overall findings; and accounting for country and ‘year fixed effects’ (i.e. the unexplained variability between years of data analysed).
A key finding from the modelling was that, relative to one’s peers, income rank affected respondents’ likelihood of experiencing pain, rather than their income measured in absolute terms. This suggests that it is a person’s perception of their financial status relative to their peers that affects their experience of pain, which is consistent with findings from previous studies.
The authors suggest that an increase in income is more protective against pain in more economically equal societies because each dollar more earned (or equivalent currency) buys the individual more social position in those societies. In countries with higher levels of income inequality, the same amount of income increase is less likely to move them up the social strata.
Overall, the findings suggest that income inequality may need to be factored into any evaluation of the effectiveness of pain-reducing policies involving income redistribution.
For example, while redistributing income to those individuals at the lower end of the income scale may incur demonstrable benefits to their quality of life, well-being and likelihood of experiencing pain, a rank-preserving income redistribution model will likely have little to no effect on reducing the overall pain experienced by the population of a country.
Co-author of the study, Dr Lucía Macchia, Lecturer in Psychology (Education and Research) at City, University of London, said:
The study is published online in the journal, Social Science and Medicine.
