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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This study evaluated whether a comprehensive assessment of psychosocial measures is useful in characterizing those acute low back pain patients who subsequently develop chronic pain disability problems. A cohort of 324 patients was evaluated, with all patients being administered a standard battery psychological assessment tests. ⋯ Analyses, conducted to differentiate between those patients who were back at work at 6 months versus those who were not because of the original back injury, revealed the importance of 3 measures: self-reported pain and disability, the presence of a personality disorder, and scores on Scale 3 of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. These results demonstrate the presence of a psychosocial disability variable that is associated with those injured workers who are likely to develop chronic disability problems.
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In this article the paths among cancer patients' physical and mental health and the reactions and mental health of their family caregivers were examined. Data for these analyses came from a cross-sectional sample of cancer patients who were recruited through ambulatory outpatient chemotherapy units, and their family caregivers. ⋯ Patients' levels of depression were related to those of their caregivers. However, caregivers' optimism proved to be a significant predictor of their mental health and reactions to caregiving.
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The relationship of individual differences in repressive coping styles with differences in antibody titer to Epstein-Barr viral capsid antigen (EBV-VCA) were investigated in a normal, healthy college population made up of people previously exposed to EBV. Each of 54 1st-year undergraduates completed a battery of physical-status questions and items pertaining to potential behavioral immunomodulatory confounds, along with the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (T-MAS) and the Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale (MC-SDS). Ss reporting high and middle levels of anxiety had higher antibody titers to EBV, suggesting poorer immune control over the latent virus, as compared with the low-anxious group. Similarly, high-defensive Ss had higher antibody titers than their low-defensive counterparts, and neither group differed from the middle group.
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College students in four experiments placed their hands in ice water (the cold-pressor task) and reported their distress. They simultaneously engaged in different reaction-time (RT) tasks that varied in the amount of attention required for successful performance. ⋯ Greater distraction, however, failed to reduce physiological, self-report, or behavioral responses to the cold-pressor task. These data call into question the hypothesis that attention mediates the process whereby distraction tasks reduce pain-produced distress.