Book Reviews
PSYCHOLOGICAL AND NEURAL MECHANISMS OF PAIN, by Donald D. Price; Raven Press, 1988, 253 pp. There are few individuals with a command of the complexities involved in measuring and interpreting psychophysical and neural responses to nociception, but Don Price is clearly one of them, and this book provides ample proof. Not that this is a comprehensive review of these enormous literatures (as the author points out), but it provides a coherent perspective on relationships between psychophysics and neurophysiology that must be worked out to understand the powerful effects of pain on behavior in the broadest sense. In this effort to deal with issues that shape experiments and interpretations at both the molecular and molar levels, there is a distinct advantage to single authorship over the edited volumes that comprise by far the majority of a plethora of available books on pain. A tolerable level of parochialism is paid for by a comprehensible progression of thoughts and experiments on: the varieties of pain sensations and underlying neural codes and controls; relationships between these sensory events and reactions that are somatic, autonomic, reflexive, purposive, emotional, and motivational; attendant processes of arousal, attention, and cognition; and the transfer of information between experiments on laboratory animals and humans, experimental and clinical pain, and acute and chronic pain and suffering.
The book can be divided into three sections.