The British journal of clinical psychology / the British Psychological Society
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Randomized Controlled Trial Comparative Study Clinical Trial
Endorsement and memory bias of self-referential pain stimuli in depressed pain patients.
This study investigates information processing in chronic pain patients by comparing the responses of depressed pain patients, non-depressed pain patients and non-pain control subjects. Each subject contributed two scores: endorsement of adjectives as descriptors of themselves and their best-friends; and free recall of the presented words. ⋯ Further analysis revealed that depressed pain patients exhibited a bias towards self-referential negative pain words, but not towards self-referential negative depression information. These results are interpreted in line with content specificity theory of information processing and have implications for targeting cognitive interventions with pain patients.