Due to fear, the ego over-conditionally responds to negative stimuli, creating fearful patterns of energy and projecting them as physical pain.

Main pain trial: pre-register approximately 320 participants, using a factorial design of fear manipulation × negative expectancy/conditioning learning, keeping physical heat stimulus intensity identical across test phases, measuring pain, expectancy, fear, skin conductance, and EEG, with additional no-pain trials and a natural history control, followed for 1 month; project duration about 12 months; test whether fear is a necessary mediator and whether it has incremental explanatory power beyond confounding factors. Question 3 involves a separate crossover trial with approximately 180 participants in three conditions: high self-focus, 20-minute meditation, and active control, with intervals of at least 48 hours; simultaneously measure temporal bisection, psychometric curve slope/Weber ratio, and temporal order discrimination thresholds, controlling arousal, attention, counting, and expectancy, to test whether subjective slowing is accompanied by actual resolution improvement.

Fear, Expectancy, and Conditioned Pain Amplification: A Preregistered Factorial Experiment

Fear and learning modulating pain does not require overturning mainstream theories; only if an independent causal carrier beyond known neural, autonomic, and endocrine mechanisms is detected would the hypothesis that 'psychogenic pain modulation is mediated by these physiological pathways' be revised.

Przemysław Bąbel；Jagiellonian University，Pain Research Group; Elżbieta A. Bajcar；Jagiellonian University，Pain Research Group; Sylvie Droit-Volet；Université Clermont Auvergne，Laboratoire de Psychologie Sociale et Cognitive; J. David Creswell；Carnegie Mellon University，Health and Human Performance Laboratory

The weak versions of fear, learning, and pain have peer-reviewed support; energy patterns lack units, measurement methods, or additional predictions, and the complete mechanism is untested; the slowed-motion proposition comes from a supplementary question and cannot be treated as a quantitative prediction already present in this original text.

In Question 3, bisection point shifts indicate duration judgment bias and cannot alone prove improved temporal resolution; evidence of psychological modulation in Question 12 also does not imply that all physical pain is created by fear.