Key aspects concerning the role of emotion in the chronic pain experience

Summary & key facts

This paper reviews recent research showing that pain and emotions are tightly linked. It explains that both pain and negative feelings are old, biological systems whose job is to protect us and help us act. The authors say these systems use similar thinking and behavior strategies to reduce bad feelings or pain. Treatments that aim at those shared strategies look promising, but we still need more studies to know how well they work for different people and how to make them widely available.

Key facts:

• This article is a review, which means the authors summarized recent studies instead of running a new experiment.
• Pain and negative emotions are described as ancient biological systems that help protect us and motivate action.
• People with long-term pain often also have mental health conditions; the two commonly occur together.
• Researchers think pain and emotions share the same kinds of thinking and behavior processes that people use to lower unpleasant feelings or pain.
• Treatments that target those shared thinking and behavior processes have shown promising results in studies so far.
• The authors say more research is needed on whether these treatments help a wide range of people, and on how to put them into regular clinical use.

Abstract

Pain and emotions are inherently connected, and this review presents contemporary findings on the pain-emotion connection. We address in what ways pain and emotions are related as well as how the link may be understood and targeted in treatment. Both pain and negative emotions are essential (and ancient) biological and motivational systems which share protective and regulatory functions. There is a marked co-occurrence between chronic pain and mental health conditions. One way to understand the pain-emotion connection, stressed by recent theoretical models, is that pain and emotions share cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that serve to downregulate these unpleasant inner states. Treatments targeting these shared regulatory mechanisms show promising results, but more research is needed on generalization, implementation and dissemination.

Topics

Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Research Musculoskeletal pain and rehabilitation Pain Management and Placebo Effect

Categories

Health Sciences Medicine Pharmacology

Tags

Biology Chronic pain Cognition Cognitive psychology Connection (principal bundle) Ecology Engineering Epistemology Generalization Key (lock) Neuroscience Philosophy Psychology Psychotherapist Structural engineering

Conditions & symptoms

Chronic Pain Chronic pain