Journal of oral rehabilitation
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Alexithymia, or a lack of emotional awareness, is prevalent in some chronic pain conditions and has been linked to poor recognition of others' emotions. Recognising others' emotions from their facial expression involves both emotional and motor processing, but the possible contribution of motor disruption has not been considered. It is possible that poor performance on emotional recognition tasks could reflect problems with emotional processing, motor processing or both. ⋯ Participants who were more accurate at one task were also more accurate at the other, regardless of group (P < 0·001, r(2) = 0·523). Participants with chronic facial pain were worse than controls at both the FEEL emotion recognition task and the left/right facial expression task and performance covaried within participants. We propose that disrupted motor processing may underpin or at least contribute to the difficulty that facial pain patients have in emotion recognition and that further research that tests this proposal is warranted.
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Chronic oro-facial pain conditions such as persistent idiopathic facial pain (PIFP), atypical odontalgia (AO) and burning mouth syndrome (BMS), usually grouped together under the concept of idiopathic oro-facial pain, remain a diagnostic and therapeutic challenge. Lack of understanding of the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms of these pain conditions is one of the important reasons behind the problems in diagnostic and management. ⋯ The present qualitative review is a joint effort of a group of oro-facial pain specialists and researchers to appraise the literature on idiopathic oro-facial pain with special focus on the currently available studies on their pathophysiological mechanisms. The implications of the findings of these studies for the clinical diagnosis and treatment of idiopathic oro-facial pain conditions are discussed.