“If we understand you well […] the relationship between intensity and aversiveness was in fact linear.” → Yes, that entire section is well put and a succinct summary of what I was trying to get at.
“My understanding is that ‘pain intensity’ is often used simply as a synonym for aversiveness or unpleasantness, as opposed to physical intensity of stimuli/pain signals.” -> I see, that wasn’t clear to me when I read your post. I think it’s good to make those distinctions clearer (as you suggested). E.g. some scholars argue that pain without aversiveness (or painfulness) is possible (mainly in pain asymbolia – maybe you’re aware of this: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2549/Feeling-Pain-and-Being-in-Pain ). It might be a good idea to distinguish pain and aversiveness conceptually or else explicitly say that you treat them as synonymous (in which case you should modify the claim “Pain’s aversiveness escalates disproportionally with its intensity” and similar claims, because it becomes contradictory)
“So the effort in this work was to try and see if it would be possible to make such a conversion of pain unpleasantness (from ordinal to ratio scale), and determine the distance among the categories of unpleasantness on a ratio scale.” -> if you put it that way it seems clearer (at least to me). I’m still not sure if that’s a substantial point, since adding or subtracting categories would change the relationship between aversiveness and the ordinal scale, but I see what you mean. I guess there is *some* value in saying that stronger verbal descriptions tend to comprise more levels of aversiveness, but to me it’s a bit of a stretch to talk about non-linearity if the x-axis in the plot is actually an ordinal axis.
“So no good studies, and no recent studies either, as far as we are aware. This is why we currently prefer a disaggregated approach, as we do not see how, with the evidence at hand, it is possible to estimate the equivalence weights with any precision.” -> yeah, that makes sense.
“If we understand you well […] the relationship between intensity and aversiveness was in fact linear.”
→ Yes, that entire section is well put and a succinct summary of what I was trying to get at.
“My understanding is that ‘pain intensity’ is often used simply as a synonym for aversiveness or unpleasantness, as opposed to physical intensity of stimuli/pain signals.”
-> I see, that wasn’t clear to me when I read your post. I think it’s good to make those distinctions clearer (as you suggested). E.g. some scholars argue that pain without aversiveness (or painfulness) is possible (mainly in pain asymbolia – maybe you’re aware of this: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/2549/Feeling-Pain-and-Being-in-Pain ). It might be a good idea to distinguish pain and aversiveness conceptually or else explicitly say that you treat them as synonymous (in which case you should modify the claim “Pain’s aversiveness escalates disproportionally with its intensity” and similar claims, because it becomes contradictory)
“So the effort in this work was to try and see if it would be possible to make such a conversion of pain unpleasantness (from ordinal to ratio scale), and determine the distance among the categories of unpleasantness on a ratio scale.”
-> if you put it that way it seems clearer (at least to me). I’m still not sure if that’s a substantial point, since adding or subtracting categories would change the relationship between aversiveness and the ordinal scale, but I see what you mean. I guess there is *some* value in saying that stronger verbal descriptions tend to comprise more levels of aversiveness, but to me it’s a bit of a stretch to talk about non-linearity if the x-axis in the plot is actually an ordinal axis.
“So no good studies, and no recent studies either, as far as we are aware. This is why we currently prefer a disaggregated approach, as we do not see how, with the evidence at hand, it is possible to estimate the equivalence weights with any precision.”
-> yeah, that makes sense.
Thanks! I will revise the post to make sure it is clearer!
Great!