1. Introduction

According to archaeological evidence, body piercing decoration was popular in ancient civilizations such as Egypt, Rome and Greece, and the carvings of tribal cultures such as Africa and Mexico's Acchikt also carry this body decoration. The bronze masks and upright figures unearthed in Sanxingdui in China also have holes in their ears. This behavior and decorative symbols have deep ideological and cultural connotations. For example, pharaohs in ancient Egypt wore nose rings to highlight their life stages and status levels, and men in ancient Rome highlighted their masculinity through ear piercing the behavior of wearing decorations also varied according to social and cultural characteristics. In the Song Dynasty, where the influence of receiving rites was more profound, women pierced their ears in order to restrain their own norms of behavior, while in the Yuan Dynasty, the behavior of men and women pierced their ears and had a deeper influence on their nomadic lifestyle [1]. The earliest piercing can be retrospect through years till the late arthropathic age (1000BC to 38000BC) when it was not an accessory for beauty but a symbol of power, culture or religion. And before that, the skill of piercing appeared by the inspiration of fish bone. The fishbone often wound people’s throats or other parts of the body, which inspired people to pierce food for the convenience of carrying and collecting, which was a symbol of labour. Throughout history, piercing could not only symbolize power but also as a representation of history and the culture during that age. In the 1960s, there was a group of people called Hippy made piercing a big change which made piercing an activity that only entertained their own as accessories [2].

2. Piercing in Recent Days

With the progress of society and the changing ages, under humanitarianism, people no longer need to hurt their bodies for their use to distinguish social rankings or to reveal their status. Nowadays, more people tend to try piercing not only for earrings or nose rings. More people tend to try piercing different body parts to show their personalities and their own attitudes. So, in recent days, it’s normal to see people wearing different kinds of rings on different body parts and people’s thoughts and attitude toward piercing has changed which also encouraged a large group of people to try piercing. Within this group of people, young people seem to take a large amount of it, especially teenagers who have the desire to try new things and be brave to practice. This act not only has decorative and existential symbols but also has the nature of spiritual pursuit and sensory experience, showing one's spirit and willpower through wounds or expressing growth to a certain stage of life. Sedley once said, "Human beings satisfy their vanity by overcoming their cowardice" [3]. For the pleasure and stimulation of the sensory experience behavior that reflects physical presence also has this characteristic. Operator it shows that people want to show their courage to the outside world, personality, and desire for beauty, or through piercings decorations highlight the essence of physical beauty.

3. Teenagers’ View of Piercing

The behavior of teenagers’ choice of piercing can be explained as a result of the progress of society which more and more people tend to accept and understand the action of piercing. Also, as age grows, teenagers gradually get rid of their parents’ “control”, which many teenagers do to show their rebellious spirit and the way of showing how “special” they are [4]. What’s more, their willingness and the way they gain information from the outside world for example the internet helps them develop their own thoughts on dressing and styling. Piercing is a way of showing a person’s own personality and attitude. However, piercing to somebody can also be addictive thing, some people enjoy the pain of piercing as a way to release the stress and anxiety in their life. But what for teenagers? Here’s a brief survey about teenagers mostly students in high school from around 5 different regions across South and North China.

Table 1: Piercing survey results.

It can be seen from the table that there are 16 out of 34 teenagers who had tried piercing before, and 6 of them had pierced more than once, one of them even tried piercing more than 5 times. In some cases, different regions and different growing environments can affect teenagers’ actions about piercing too, however, it still seems like a relatively large number of teenagers have tried piercing and many of them prefer to try piercing more than once. Of these 16 teenagers, only one who has tried piercing more than 5 times found piercing addictive. What’s more, of the 34 teenagers, 13 of them agree that piercing is addictive, while others don’t. However, of those who believe that piercing is addictive, only 5 of them have tried piercing before.

4. Theoretical Data

Patrick Wall of the University of London and Ronald Meljak of McGill University in Canada have long studied pain. Speaking of the human side Melgak has spent years collecting the words that people use to describe their pain. He found one that was commonly used and grouped them into categories such as "prickling, scalding, burning, exhausting, annoying, unbearable...". When it comes to pain, there will be different types of pain on different occasions, and also different to different people since it’s a personal feeling [5].

The 1994 International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) defined pain as: "An unpleasant sensation or emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or a complaint of symptoms described in the word meter associated with such damage" [6]. So, pain should have two properties: One is pain sensing, which mainly detects and detects the intensity, location, duration, timing and quality of traumatic stimuli, and transmits information via ventrobasally complex to the somatosensory cortex to generate sensory-recognition function. The other is pain response, which mainly functions as emotional reactions such as concern, memory and patience from pain, namely the so-called motivational-affective and cognitive-evaluative functions. By means of body electrophysiology, it was found that spinal dorsal horn pain-related neurons, such as wide dynamic range (WDR) neurons, showed enhanced spontaneous discharge immediately after BV injection [7]. This phenomenon also lasted for more than 1 hour, and then gradually weakened to disappear. It is consistent with the behavioral spontaneous foot shrinking reaction in time. Mechanical and thermal pain sensitivity was observed on the same and contralateral sides for 72-96 hours. It is believed that sustained firing of neurons associated with spinal dorsal horn pain could have a dramatic effect on the cortex involved in the brain. The conclusion they got was that Sustained peripheral traumatizing stimuli can induce long-term enhanced synaptic excitability and long-term activity-dependent synaptic plasticity changes in the primary somatosensory cortex [8]. These changes may be related to the long-term perceptual changes associated with persistent pain, this is because excitatory synaptic transmission is enhanced in the spinal cord, amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and other pain-related brain structures under different pain stimuli [9].

There was a study to explore the relationship between subthreshold priming pain scene pain empathy ability and negative emotional attention of students. The results show that the pain scene was primed, and the observer avoided the sad emotion. This result supports an early assessment model of pain empathy, in which the observer's assessment of pain cues influences the posterior emotional response. At the same time, the results suggest that individuals are more closely associated with sadness in the subthreshold processing of pain scenes.

Although pain is an unpleasant experience, it is also a necessary way for human beings to confirm and protect themselves. "The distribution of pain and related sensations throughout the body provides a boundary of the self," says British doctor Brand. Pain can confirm the self [10].

As the most basic and initial physiological reaction function in the human body, pain contains far more diverse and complex connotations than people imagine. Human's understanding of its own mystery is far from clear and sufficient. Perhaps it is these mysteries that make "pain" and people's lives have always maintained a vague relationship. On the one hand, people try to avoid pain, on the other hand, they seem to seek it, especially when the process of "pain" involves more than a daunting physical response human beings develop a capacity for pain that is unimaginable under normal circumstances, even as the choice to endure mental pain becomes an expression of will and power.

5. Discussion

It is fun to notice that many people who haven’t really tried piercing before think it’s addictive, while among the people who have tried piercing before, only a relatively small potential of them consider piercing addictive. However, it is hard to discuss whether these people who considered it not addictive truly found it not addictive or just because they hadn’t noticed that the reason why they tried piercing more than once was because of the addiction. It’s also worth considering why piercing has left the impression of addictive in lots of people’s minds. Is it because of the consensus or just come from people’s prejudice, or can it be related to people’s attitude and thoughts on “pain”, does it map how people tend to relate pain to something?

6. Conclusion

Piercing nowadays can be a quite controversial topic for teenagers. More teenagers are trying to escape from the constraints of their parents and more like to show themself, so many teenagers choose piercing as a way of showing their difference and the growth of them. However, it can be seen from the previous lines that although the pain from a piercing can be addictive, it still remains to be seen, that there are still a lot of teenagers who try piercing more than once, especially when they are with anxiety and stress from study and their puberty issues. Some of them might choose such a way which is piercing to release their pressure. Since it’s hard for teenagers to control their behaviors, and the communication between parents and children is becoming weaker with the growth of age, it’s sometimes a harmful activity for teenagers to pierce without limiting, almost all teenagers have suffered from allergies, festering wound and other issues from piercing, some of them even trying to copy what some people show online to pierce on some sensitive and fragile places on their body, which leads to more serious effect and some of them are irreversible. So, it’s seriously important for not only parents and teachers but also teenagers themselves to control the action of piercing and try not to hurt their bodies. It’s also necessary for teenagers to come up with the knowledge that piercing is a simple activity for self-expression, but also a serious health-affective behavior that may lead to serious results. Last but not least, the internet is also an important place that should have more information and safety instructions about piercing. For this essay, there are some small insufficiencies, for example, the data from the survey was limited, and not enough data has been selected due to time limitations, if available, it is better to select more than 50 data to ensure the diversity and possibilities. What’s more, there are still questions that remain to be solved, for example, the reason why many people think piercing is addictive even when they haven’t ever tried piercing before, and how it might be related to the opinion people think of pain and addiction.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to all my schoolmates for supporting my survey, and thanks to my essay teacher for teaching my writing this essay, she helped me from knowing nothing about writing an essay to finally finishing this article.