McGill Pain Questionnaire

The McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ) consists of 78 words, obtained from pain patient interviews and the clinical literature, which describe distinctly different aspects of the experience of pain (Melzack 1975). The words are categorized into three major classes:

1. 1. Words that describe the sensory qualities of the experience in terms of temporal, spatial, pressure, thermal, and other properties.
2. 2. Words that describe affective qualities in terms of tension, fear, and autonomic properties that are part of the pain experience.
3. 3. Evaluative words that describe the subjective overall intensity of the total pain experience.

Each class comprises several subclasses, which contain a group of words that are considered by most subjects to be qualitatively similar (Melzack and Torgerson 1971).

Description

Administration and Scoring of the MPQ

The descriptor lists of.