Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association
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The purpose of this study was to investigate how headache sufferers and headache-free controls differ in their responses to acute pain. Thirty-three women completed the study (15 headache sufferers and 18 controls). ⋯ Headache sufferers reported a tendency to catastrophize during both tasks; positive coping did not differ between the 2 groups. These results offer evidence that recurrent tension headache sufferers are more sensitive to both painful and nonpainful stimuli and that they cope differently from controls with these physical stressors.
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
Effects of cognitive coping skills training on coping strategies and experimental pain sensitivity in African American adults with sickle cell disease.
The present study examined whether training in cognitive coping skills would enhance pain coping strategies and alter pain perception in adults with sickle cell disease (SCD). Sixty-four African Americans with SCD were randomly assigned to either a cognitive coping skills condition (three 45-min sessions in which patients were trained to use 6 cognitive coping strategies) or a disease-education control condition (three 45-min didactic-discussion sessions about SCD). Pain sensitivity to calibrated noxious stimulation was measured at pre- and posttesting, as were cognitive coping strategies, clinical pain, and health behaviors. Results indicated that, compared with the randomly assigned control condition, brief training in cognitive coping skills resulted in increased coping attempts, decreased negative thinking, and lower tendency to report pain during laboratory-induced noxious stimulation.