S401 PAIN CATASTROPHIZING, THREAT, AND THE INFORMATIONAL VALUE OF MOOD: TASK PERSISTENCE DURING A PAINFUL FINGER PRESSING TASK (original) (raw)
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Pain catastrophizing has shown to predict avoidance behavior in acute and chronic pain, but the literature is inconsistent. The present study tested the hypothesis that current mood and threat context moderate the relationship between pain catastrophizing and performance duration. Affective-motivational models postulate that negative and positive moods provide information about whether an activity is respectively threatening or safe. Moreover, it has been proposed that stable cognitive schemas about threat influence behavior particularly in threat-relevant contexts. The present study aimed to establish whether pain catastrophizing is related to less or greater performance duration, when participants experience respectively negative or positive moods, particularly in a high threatening pain context. A 2 mood  2 threat context between-subjects factorial design was applied in 89 healthy participants with pain catastrophizing as covariate and performance duration during a painful finger pressing task as dependent variables. As predicted, higher pain catastrophizing was associated with less performance duration when participants experienced negative moods. The opposite was found when participants experienced positive moods. Moreover, these relationships were most pronounced in a high threatening pain context. This study suggests that the relationship between pain catastrophizing and performance duration during painful activities is moderated by situational factors such as current mood and threat context. Ó
Please cite this article as: Karsdorp, P.A., Ranson, S., Nijst, S., Vlaeyen, J.W.S., Goals, mood and performance duration on cognitive tasks during Experimentally induced mechanical pressure pain,
Pain catastrophizing moderates the effects of pain-contingent task interruptions
European Journal of Pain, 2013
Background: A prominent behavioural consequence of pain is the temporary suspension of current activities with intent to resume them later. Little is known about the effects of such pain-contingent task interruptions. This experiment examines the influence of pain-contingent interruptions on the amount of time spent performing a cognitive achievement task: We expected that people would spend more time on task when task performance was interrupted in response to pain (vs. no interruption), and that negative mood and pain catastrophizing would enhance this negative impact. Methods: Healthy volunteers read behaviour descriptions until they felt they could form a good impression. Before task performance, participants underwent a negative or positive mood induction. During the task, all participants expected painful stimulation. Half of the participants in each mood induction group received an acute (electrocutaneous) pain stimulus, resulting in a 2-min break from the task. The other participants received no sensory stimulation during task performance and their performance was not interrupted. Results: Results revealed no effect of mood on task performance (i.e., total number of descriptions read). There was, however, a significant interaction between task interruption and pain catastrophizing, indicating that participants with low levels of catastrophizing tended to read more descriptions when performance was interrupted than when not, whereas participants reporting relatively high levels of catastrophizing showed the reverse behavioural pattern. Conclusions: The impact of pain-contingent task interruptions was reversed in participants reporting relatively high levels of pain catastrophizing. Results are discussed with regard to interruption management in the context of chronic pain.
Mood, stop-rules and task persistence: No Mood-as-Input effects in the context of pain
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2013
Background and objectives: Task persistence despite experiencing pain might be a risk factor for development and maintenance of chronic pain. The Mood-as-Input (MAI) model predicts that the impact of mood on individuals' motivation to persist in a task depends on the interpretation of current mood within a certain motivational context. The aim of the current study was to replicate the original MAI study , but in a context where the task is painful. Methods: A 2 Mood (negative versus positive) Â 2 Stop-Rule (achievement versus hedonic) between-subjects factorial design was used in which 120 healthy participants (97 women, mean age ¼ 21.78 years, SD ¼ 3.07) performed an impression-formation task while being exposed to mechanically induced pressure pain. Results: The MAI interaction hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead, participants showed more task persistence when they used hedonic stop-rules as a ground to decide on task (dis)continuation than when they used an achievement-oriented stop-rule. Additionally, participants reporting less pain-related fear also spent more time on the painful impression-formation task. The current findings suggest that the MAI perspective might not apply to task persistence behavior in a pain context. Limitations: These findings may not generalize to task performance in patients with chronic pain.
PAIN, 1997
Preliminary evidence from a study using a modified Stroop paradigm suggests that individuals with chronic pain selectively attend to pain-related information. The current study was conducted in an attempt to replicate and extend this finding. Nineteen patients with chronic pain stemming from musculoskeletal injury and 22 healthy control subjects participated. All participants completed a computerised task designed to evaluate attentional allocation to cues thematically related to pain and injury via measurement of detection latencies for dotprobes that followed their presentation. Results indicated that patients did not differ from control subjects in their pattern of responses to dot-probes that were presented following either the pain-or injury-related cues. This pattern of results continued to hold true after including level of depression as a covariate in the analysis. However, when patients were divided on the basis of scores on the Anxiety Sensitivity Index (Peterson, R.A. and Reiss, S., Anxiety Sensitivity Index Manual, 2nd edn., International Diagnostic Systems, Worthington, OH, 1992), a measure related to fear of pain (Asmundson, G.J.G. and Norton, G.R., Behav. Res. Ther., 34 (1996) 545-554), those with low anxiety sensitivity shifted attention away from stimuli related to pain whereas those with high anxiety sensitivity responded similarly to dotprobes regardless of the parameters of presentation. These results suggest that the operation of the information processing system in patients with chronic pain may be dependent on a patient's trait predisposition to fear pain. Theoretical and ecological implications are discussed. © 1997 International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Elsevier Science B.V.
Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 2020
Background Although pain-related avoidance is mainly intended to reduce the accompanying anticipatory fear, avoidance behavior may paradoxically increase fear when a previous avoidance response is no longer available, suggesting that there is a bidirectional relationship between pain-related fear and avoidance. Purpose We hypothesized that avoidance can serve as a source of information that fuels irrational pain-related threat appraisals, which, in turn, increases pain-related fear. Methods Participants (N = 66) were exposed to a painful heat stimulus and randomly assigned to the avoidance or control group. They were instructed to avoid the full heat intensity by pressing a stop button in the presence of a stop cue. Only avoidance group participants received a stop cue and were allowed to press the stop button, while control group participants received the same instructions but never had the opportunity to avoid the full heat intensity. In reality and unknown to participants, the in...
Effects of responsibility and mood on painful task persistence
Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 2013
Background and objectives: Not just avoidance behaviour, but also painful task persistence might be a risk factor for development and maintenance of pain complaints. In seeking to understand these dysfunctional patterns of task performance, it has been suggested that mood influences the individuals' motivation to persist in a task depending on the interpretation of current mood within a certain motivational context. The aim of the present study was to test the effects of a social responsibility context and mood on persistence on a painful finger pressing task. Methods: A 2 Mood (positive vs. negative) Â 2 Responsibility (high vs. neutral) between-subjects factorial design was used in which 79 healthy participants (53 women; mean age ¼ 22.99 years, SD ¼ 4.77) performed the finger pressing task. Results: The results show that mood and sense of responsibility independently influence task persistence: participants in a negative as opposed to positive mood spent more time on the task; the same was true for participants who reported a stronger sense of responsibility. In addition, an increase in pain during the task was associated with longer task persistence. No effect of pain-related fear on task persistence was found. Conclusion: This experimental study was the first to demonstrate an effect of sense of responsibility on persistence in a painful physical task.
Threat of pain influences social context effects on verbal pain report and facial expression
Behaviour Research and Therapy, 2009
Current theoretical models of pain catastrophizing have diverging predictions regarding the role of social context and perceived threat on pain expression. The communal coping model of catastrophizing predicts that high pain catastrophizers display more pain expression in the presence of another, regardless of the threat value of the pain, while a cognitive appraisal model predicts high pain catastrophizers to express more pain when pain has increased threat value, regardless of social context. A 2 Â 2 factorial design was used to test the validity of both predictions. Healthy participants with varying levels of pain catastrophizing were exposed to a cold pressor task, consisting of a 60 s immersion and 60 s recovery period. Interestingly, the immersion results revealed that beyond and independent from the effects of pain catastrophizing, the effect of threat on verbal pain report and facial expression was dependent on social context and vice versa. In a threatening context, perceived threat of pain mediated the inhibitory effect of social presence on pain expression, suggesting that the observer acted as a safety signal. In the recovery period, social presence enhanced facial expression, but only when no threat was induced. The results are discussed in terms of the dynamic interaction between social context and threat appraisals.
The role of motivation in distracting attention away from pain: An experimental study
Pain, 2010
Research on the effectiveness of distraction as a method of pain control is inconclusive. One mechanism pertains to the motivational relevance of distraction tasks. In this study the motivation to engage in a distraction task during pain was experimentally manipulated. Undergraduate students (N=73) participated in a cold pressor test (CPT) and were randomly assigned to three groups: a distraction-only group performed a tone-detection task during ther CPT, a motivated-distraction group performed the same task and received a monetary reward for good task performance, and a control group did not perform the tone-detection task. Results indicated that engagement in the distraction task was better in the motivated-distraction group in comparison with the distraction-only group. Participants in both distraction groups experienced less pain compared to the control group. There were no overall differences in pain intensity between the two distraction groups. The effect of distraction was influenced by the level of catastrophic thinking about pain. For low catastrophizers, both distraction groups reported less pain as compared to the nondistracted control group. This was not the case for high catastrophizers. For high catastrophizers it mattered whether the distraction task was motivationally relevant: High catastrophizers reported less intense pain in the motivated distraction group, as compared to the non-distracted control group. We conclude that increasing the motivational relevance of the distraction task may increase the effects of distraction, especially for those who catastrophize about pain.