Psychology

To analyse the number of, timing of, and reasons for early termination of interdisciplinary pain rehabilitation (IPR).

Evaluate the effectiveness of an intensive interdisciplinary pain treatment (IIPT) day-hospital program as compared to an outpatient multimodal treatment (MMT) for youth with chronic pain.

The opioid epidemic is a significant public health problem largely driven by opioid prescriptions for chronic pain. Among those with chronic pain, anxiety and depressive symptoms have been linked to opioid misuse, and individual differences in anxiety and depressive symptoms among adults with chronic pain may be important for better understanding pain. Yet, little work has examined mechanisms that may link anxiety and depressive symptoms to opioid misuse among adults with chronic pain. Anxiety sensitivity, or the fear of anxiety-related physical sensations, may be one candidate construct that has been linked independently to anxiety and depressive symptoms as well as opioid misuse.

Psychological flexibility is considered a fundamental aspect of health. It includes six interrelated facets: 1) cognitive defusion, 2) acceptance, 3) contact with the present moment, 4) self-as-context, 5) values, and 6) committed action. To gain further insight into psychological flexibility and its effects on health, reliable and valid instruments to assess all facets are needed. Committed action is one facet that is understudied. A long and short version of a validated measure (CAQ and CAQ-8) have been developed in English. Currently, there are no German versions of the CAQ. Aim of this study is to validate German-language versions of these in a chronic pain population.

In line with research highlighting the role of observer appraisals in understanding individuals' pain experience, recent work has demonstrated the effects of parental child- and self-oriented injustice appraisals on child pain-related outcomes. However, research on parental injustice appraisals is in its infancy and lacks a valid and context-specific operationalization of what parental injustice appraisals of child pain precisely entail. The current study presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of parental child- and self-oriented appraisals of injustice in the context of their child's chronic pain.

Exposure to stress is associated with poor outcomes in people with chronic pain. Dispositional variables, such as pain catastrophizing and distress intolerance, may impact reactivity to stressors. Importantly, these variables can be modified with treatment. The aim of this study was to investigate whether pain catastrophizing and distress intolerance were associated with tolerance of a pain stressor or a psychosocial stressor, and heightened negative affect following these stressors. A sample of 50 adults with chronic pain completed self-report measures and pain and psychosocial stress inductions. Results indicated that pain catastrophizing was associated with heightened anxiety during pain induction. Distress intolerance was associated with negative affect following a psychosocial stressor, and with poorer tolerance of the psychosocial stressor. Pain catastrophizing and distress intolerance are related factors, however, they exhibit distinct associations with amplification of pain and psychosocial stress reactivity. These variables may be important treatment targets in people with chronic pain.

Depressive symptoms are common among individuals with chronic pain. Previous work suggests that chronic pain patients have difficulty regulating emotional responses, which is a risk factor for the development of major depressive disorder (MDD). Function of the mesocorticolimbic system, a neural network associated with reward processing, contributes to emotion regulation. This network's dysfunction has been described in chronic pain and MDD research and potentially underlies the relationship among emotion dysregulation, chronic pain, and MDD development. Given that mood induction paradigms have been used to measure emotion regulation, the present study examined intrinsic mesocorticolimbic functional connectivity (FC) after induced sad mood in individuals with and without chronic low back pain (cLBP). Thirty-three MDD-free individuals (17 cLBP) underwent resting-state scanning before and after sad memory-evoked mood induction. A Group [cLBP, healthy control (HC)] x Mood (Neutral, Sadness) repeated measures ANCOVA was conducted on seed-based FC data using a mesolimbic a priori region of interest. Interaction effects were identified in the orbital frontal cortex and inferior frontal gyrus [F = 21.07, p < .05. h = .5]. Whereas cLBP showed significantly greater FC between these two regions and the mesolimbic seed under neutral mood, FC among these regions increased in HC and decreased in cLBP under sad mood. Exploratory graph theory analyses further describe between-group differences in mesocorticolimbic network properties. Findings support previous literature describing mesocorticolimbic dysfunction in cLBP and demonstrate aberrant function in emotion regulation. Mesocorticolimbic dysfunction during emotion regulation might contribute to the development of certain depressive phenotypes in chronic pain patients.