On knowing an infant's pain

Erroneous beliefs prevent effective management of infant pain, with the focus on self-report of the current definition of pain leading to neglect of nonverbal diagnostic information. Models of pain should consider not only experience but pain expression and how this is decoded and interpreted. The common-sense appeal of the belief that pain is a conscious experience is deficient, because there is no consensus on the nature of consciousness. Caregivers tend to self-reference and search for adult capacities for focal awareness in infants. The search seems to obfuscate our understanding of infant pain. Greater attention should be devoted to age-specific experience, the emotional distress of pain in infancy, and the important role of implicit information processing, or an impact for pain outside of focal attention.