Psychology & health
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Psychology & health · Dec 2011
A contextual approach on sex-related biases in pain judgements: the moderator effects of evidence of pathology and patients' distress cues on nurses' judgements of chronic low-back pain.
Although women report feeling more pain than men, their pain is often underdiagnosed and undertreated. By proposing a gender-based theoretical conceptualisation, we argue that such sex-related biases may be enhanced or suppressed by contextual variables pertaining to the clinical situation, the perceiver or the patient. Consequently, we aimed to explore the moderator role of two clinically relevant variables in a chronic low-back pain (CLBP) scenario: diagnostic evidence of pathology (EP) and pain behaviours conveying distress. ⋯ Moreover, nurses showed biases against men, but only in the presence of EP. The influence of distress cues was less consistent. Theoretical and practical implications are drawn.