The TSSP effect reflected by lower pain rating reliability appears to be induced in the high heat-tolerance group when a contact-heat stimulation is preceded by another stimulation with higher intensity but with the same duration. This is possibly due to the longer offset time of contact-heat stimulations with higher intensity, and also the top-down modulatory effects in this high heat-tolerance group. Further electrophysiological studies would be needed to investigate the underlying neural processes of TSSP in individuals with different heat tolerance.
Chan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.