Overview

• An international team led by Lancaster University tested two monetary equivalence methods (ME1 ordered, ME2 random) across three randomized experiments with about 330 adults.
• The monetary measures outperformed numerical, visual analog, and gLMS scales at separating high from low pain, showing very large effect sizes versus small to medium for standard tools.
• In a heat-pain arm comparing topical anesthetic to placebo, the monetary approach consistently detected treatment effects and avoided expectation-driven biases seen in self-reports.
• The method elicits whether participants would accept specified sums to repeat the same stimulus, identifying a switch point that reflects the pain’s monetary value.
• Authors highlight limits including brief laboratory stimuli, a mostly Swiss student sample, and income effects, and they call for wider validation before clinical use; the study appears in Social Science & Medicine (2025).