Baseline characteristics of the sample.

aPainless-Painful represents patients’ exposure to the painless (clinical/mirror only) examination followed by the painful (pocketing and bleeding on probing) examination. The Painful-Painless condition reversed the order of the examinations.bχ2 test.ct test.dPeriodontal assessment was obtained by probing each dental element six times. An average Probing Depth (in mm) per patient was computed by averaging those 6 measurements within and then across available dental elements. An average Bleeding on Probing per patient was obtained by averaging the sum of bleeding on probing of each available dental element.