Empathetic verbal feedback from others has been shown to alleviate the intensity of experimental pain on an experiment on pain perception and empathy in humans.
In the experiment they created a dedicated setup mimicking a medical environment where people enduring painful stimuli received empathetic or unempathetic comments from others. Positive (empathetic) feedback was able to reduce pain intensity perception, in agreement with previous theoretical models and experimental studies, while negative (unempathetic) feedback did not induce consistent changes in pain intensity reports.