A study conducted by University College London, King's College London and the University of Hertfordshire suggests that women who avoid intimacy with their partner experience more pain while giving birth when fathers are in delivery room.Women who lack emotional intimacy with their partner are likely to suffer more pains in the father's presence, new research showed, replacing a former belief that the presence of the father in delivery room inhibits the pain of the mother in childbirth.The experts who conducted the research gave women a moderately painful laser pulse on one of their fingers and asked them to rate the intensity of the pain. Researchers also measured how the electrical activity in their brains 'spiked' in response to the laser pulses, to sort out the relation between pain reports and brain activity. Each woman was also given a questionnaire to measure whether she wanted or avoided emotional intimacy in relationships. The study found that those participants who avoided closeness in their relationships, experienced more pain when their romantic partner was present in delivery room.But the presence of a partner had no major effect on the pain felt by women who were intimate in their relationships.