APS Press Room
News Highlights from The Journal of Pain • May 2006
The Peer Review Journal of the American Pain Society
| For immediate release | Contact: Chuck Weber (847) 705-1802 |
PARENT AND CHILD ANXIETY SENSITIVITY; RELATIONSHIP TO CHILDREN’S EXPERIMENTAL PAIN RESPONSIVITY
Jennie C. I. Tsao, Qian Lu, Cynthia D. Myers, Su C. Kim, Norman Turk and Lonnie K. Zeltzer, Department of Pediatrics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Anxiety sensitivity (AS) refers to the tendency to interpret anxiety sensations, such as a rapid heartbeat, as a predictor of harmful outcomes. In adult studies, this fear of anxiety sensations has been associated with chronic pain and, in laboratory studies, women with high AS have shown increased experimental pain sensitivity. Some retrospective studies have found that childhood pain experiences correlate with high AS in adults. Further, parental perceptions of pain may influence how children perceive it. No studies to date have examined relationships among parent AS (PAS), child AS (CAS), and children’s responses to controlled pain stimuli.
For this article, researchers evaluated 104 girls and 107 boys (mean age 12.4) and 178 mothers. They tested a conceptual model in which parent AS would predict child AS. Thus, parent AS would be related to child laboratory pain intensity via its contribution to child AS. The model was validated in girls but not boys. The authors noted their findings agree with prior research reporting significant associations between parental anxiety and child distress during painful medical procedures. They concluded that a parental tendency to interpret anxiety symptoms as dangerous may influence how healthy girls respond to painful stimuli.
HYPERVIGILENCE TO LEARNED PAIN SIGNALS: A COMPONENTIAL ANALYSIS
Stefaan Van Damme, Geert Crombez, Christopher Eccleston and Ernst H.W. Koster, Department of Psychology, Ghent University, Belgium
For chronic pain patients, hypervigilance or attending to pain at the expense of other information intensifies avoidance and escape tendencies. It emerges in anyone who is confronted with threatening pain and wants to avoid or escape it. In this study, subjects exposed to laboratory pain stimuli were evaluated to gain further understanding of hypervigilance during their anticipation of pain. The researchers concluded that hypervigilance emerged as:
- Enhanced engagement to conditioned pain signals
- Difficulty disengaging attention from conditioned pain signals
- Rapid responding to pain signals.
These findings suggest that treatment approaches using attention techniques should not focus on preventing patients from shifting their attention to the pain, but on diminishing the threat value and learning to disengage from their pain.
DOES SELF-EFFICACY INFLUENCE LEG MUSCLE PAIN DURING CYCLING EXERCISE?
Robert W. Motl, James F. Konopack, Liang Hu and Edward McAuley Department of Kinesiology and Community Health, University of Illinois
Little is known about the psychological influences on muscle pain during exercise. One reason to believe self-efficacy is a potential influence on muscle pain is that it is considered to be inversely related with ratings of perceived exertion during exercise. Also, there is moderate-to-strong correlation between perceptions of exertion and muscle pain. The authors hypothesized that enhanced self-efficacy would be associated with lower ratings of naturally occurring muscle pain during exercise.
Twenty-eight low or moderately active college-age women were randomly assigned to two groups to increase or decrease efficacy beliefs for engaging in moderate physical activity. Efficacy was manipulated using bogus feedback after an exercise test. After 2-3 days, participants completed 30 minutes of cycling on an ergometer.
The researchers found that although bogus feedback was effective for manipulating self-efficacy, there was no differential effect on leg muscle pain intensity ratings in either group. The authors noted these findings should not be generalized to other groups, such as very physically active women and elite athletes.