A Trick for Making Vaccinations Less Painful
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 Ratings
🗓️ 26 January 2021
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Learn about an easy trick for making needles less painful; how ancient Mayans used zeolite to filter water more than 2,000 years ago; and the story behind moonmoons, the hilarious name astronomers have proposed for moons that orbit other moons.
Smiling or grimacing reduces needle pain by Steffie Drucker
- Smiling sincerely or grimacing can significantly reduce the pain of needle injection. (2020, December). Smiling sincerely or grimacing can significantly reduce the pain of needle injection. UCI News. https://news.uci.edu/2020/12/01/smiling-sincerely-or-grimacing-can-significantly-reduce-the-pain-of-needle-injection/
- Pressman, S. D., Acevedo, A. M., Hammond, K. V., & Kraft-Feil, T. L. (2020). Smile (or grimace) through the pain? The effects of experimentally manipulated facial expressions on needle-injection responses. Emotion. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000913
- Episode on the facial feedback hypothesis: https://www.curiositydaily.com/can-smiling-actually-make-you-happier-and-why-a-clockmaker-figured-out-longitude/
The Ancient Maya used zeolite and quartz to filter drinking water 2,000 years ago by Grant Currin
- Starr, M. (2020). An Ancient Maya City Had a Surprisingly Effective Water Filtration System. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/an-ancient-maya-civilisation-had-surprisingly-effective-water-filtration-system
- Tankersley, K. B., Dunning, N. P., Carr, C., Lentz, D. L., & Scarborough, V. L. (2020). Zeolite water purification at Tikal, an ancient Maya city in Guatemala. Scientific Reports, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-75023-7
Moons can have moons called moonmoons originally aired October 16, 2018: https://omny.fm/shows/curiosity-daily/moonmoons-why-you-get-sick-when-seasons-change-and
- Kollmeier, J. A., & Raymond, S. N. (2018). Can moons have moons? Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, 483(1), L80–L84. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/sly219
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily. |
| 0:05.0 | From Curiosity.com, I'm Cody Goff. |
| 0:07.0 | And I'm Ashley Hamer. |
| 0:08.0 | Today you learn about an easy trick for making needles less painful. |
| 0:12.0 | How Mayan Civilizations filtered water more than 2,000 years ago, |
| 0:16.4 | and the hilarious name that astronomers have proposed |
| 0:18.9 | for moons that orbit other moons. |
| 0:21.3 | Let's set us fast in curiosity. The COVID-19 vaccine is here, which is pretty |
| 0:27.4 | exciting because this is a big step in resuming some kind of normal. Of course, it's also bittersweet for those of us who don't like |
| 0:34.8 | needles, but if that's you I've got some good news. Scientists have |
| 0:39.4 | discovered a free and easy way to ease the pain. Smile. Or grimace, up to you. This came from |
| 0:46.8 | researchers at the University of California Irvine. They started by recruiting |
| 0:50.6 | 231 psychology students for a study that supposedly explored how multitasking |
| 0:56.6 | affected needle pain. They crafted this ruse so the students wouldn't overthink how their facial |
| 1:02.3 | expressions affected their pain. the students |
| 1:05.0 | with a |
| 1:08.0 | with a harmless saline solution using a needle that's common for flu shots. |
| 1:11.0 | The students, meanwhile, were randomly assigned to grimace or smile or |
| 1:16.4 | keep a straight face while getting their shot. Now, weirdly, everyone did this while holding |
| 1:21.6 | a chopstick in their mouth. |
| 1:23.4 | That was to keep the expressions the same across participants. |
| 1:27.2 | They rated their stress before the shots |
... |
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