THE McGILL PAIN QUESTIONNAIRE

The problem of pain, since the beginning of this century, has been dominated by the concept that pain is purely a sensory experience. Yet it has a unique, distinctively unpleasant, affective quality that differentiates it from sensory experiences such as sight, hearing or touch. . . . The motivational-affective dimension of pain is brought clearly into focus by clinical studies on frontal lobotomy . . . Typically, these patients report after the operation that they still have pain but it does not bother them. . . . the suffering, the anguish are gone. . . . Similarly, patients exhibiting "pain asymbolia" . . . after lesions of portions of the parietal lobe or the frontal cortex are able to appreciate the spatial and temporal properties of noxious stimuli (for example, they recognize pin pricks as sharp) but fail to withdraw or complain about them. . . . These considerations suggest that there are three major psychological dimensions of pain: sensory-discriminative, motivational-affective, and cognitive-evaluative. (3), pp93-95)