Psychosomatic medicine
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Psychosomatic medicine · Jul 2000
Effect of early body image dissatisfaction on subsequent psychological and physical adjustment after disfiguring injury.
The impact of body image dissatisfaction on quality of life after severe burn injury was investigated after controlling for other determinants of outcome (i.e., injury, distress, and preburn quality of life). ⋯ Body image dissatisfaction affects quality of life after severe burn injury. Distress moderates this impact on aspects of physical but not psychosocial health.
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Psychosomatic medicine · Jul 2000
Comparative StudyRace and sex differences in cutaneous pain perception.
The purpose of this study was to determine race and sex differences in cutaneous pain perception. ⋯ These differences in pain perception may be associated with different pain mechanisms: in the ease of sex, differences in opioid activity and baroreceptor-regulated pain systems; in the case of race, unmeasured psychological characteristics are suggested by the larger differences in ratings of pain unpleasantness than pain intensity.
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Psychosomatic medicine · Jul 2000
Pervasive emotion recognition deficit common to alexithymia and the repressive coping style.
Previous research has demonstrated a deficit in the ability to recognize emotions in alexithymic individuals. The repressive coping style is thought to preferentially impair the detection of unpleasant compared with pleasant emotions, and the degree of deficit is typically thought to be less severe than in alexithymia. We compared emotion recognition ability in both individuals with alexithymia and those with the repressive coping style. ⋯ The results indicate that alexithymia and the repressive coping style are each associated with impairments in the recognition of both pleasant and unpleasant emotions and that the two styles of emotional self-regulation differ more in the magnitude than in the quality of these impairments.