WOULD you rather have more pain now, or less pain within the next minute? If you go for the second option, you are a “moderate dreader”: you don’t get particularly anxious about upcoming unpleasantness. If you’d rather get it over with, you are an “extreme dreader”, willing to take more pain now to avoid the agony of a delay.
Gregory Berns of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia, scanned the brains of 32 volunteers while delivering electric shocks to their feet. The researchers first delivered 96 shocks, varying the waiting time before each shock and its intensity.…
