Does Working Memory Moderate the Within-Person Associations Between Pain Intensity and Negative Affect and Pain's Interference With Work Goal Pursuit?

How Pain Shapes Depression and Anxiety: A Hybrid Self-regulatory/Predictive Mind Perspective

Because many persons living with chronic pain achieve a relatively balanced lifestyle without experiencing functional disability, medical psychologists must explain the well-documented co-occurrence of pain complaints and DSM-5-disorders (including but not limited to depression and anxiety) in a significant subset of individuals. The question of differential resilience versus susceptibility has received modest theoretical and empirical attention, but remains open. In this review, I deconstruct the temporally extended pain adaptation process in order to address this vexing question, relying upon two complementary explanatory frames. The first is a motivational/cybernetic systems formulation labeled the Goal-Centered, Self-Regulatory, Automated Social Systems Psychology (GRASSP) model, erected upon feedback sensitive, goal-guided, hierarchically organized self-regulatory processes. Depression and anxiety presumably result from compromised regulatory functions undermining pain processing, goal pursuit, and everyday performance. The second perspective postulates a "Bayesian Brain"/"Predictive Mind" capable of unifying perception, action, and emotion via predictive processing. From a Bayesian perspective, predictive processing implies that our brains evolved to compare, without conscious direction, incoming environmental information against prior, model-based predictions in order to arrive at accurate perceptual representations of the world. Maladjustment results from failures of active inference. When applied to the perception of visceral information, the embodied process, termed interoceptive inference, can also yield pathogenic outcomes. The Bayesian model holds that depression and anxiety in individuals with pain result from error-prone (biased, rigid, or highly certain) prior evaluations of aversive feeling states and their relation to the external milieu. I consider how the hybrid conceptual framework advanced by the two models points to several novel and familiar avenues of intervention.

The role of affect in chronic pain: A systematic review of within-person symptom dynamics

OBJECTIVE

Chronic pain is conceptualized as a biopsychosocial phenomenon that involves both physical and emotional processes. The vast majority of research regarding these facets of chronic pain characterizes differences between individuals. In this review, we describe problems with assuming that differences between persons accurately characterize within-person processes. We also provide a systematic review of studies that have examined within-person relationships between pain and affect among individuals with chronic pain.

METHOD

Articles published by December 2020 that pertained to within-person assessment of pain and emotion, affect, or mood were identified. Data regarding study design, adherence, and concurrent and prospective relationships among pain and affect variables were extracted and summarized.

RESULTS

Of 611 abstracts, 55 studies met inclusion criteria. Results suggest that individuals with chronic pain tend to experience increased negative affect and decreased positive affect when experiencing more severe pain (r_pooled = .18 and - .19, respectively). However, the size of these effects appeared smaller than between-person associations, and there was evidence of significant variability between individuals. Examination of predictive relationships between pain and affect largely suggested the tendency of symptoms to predict themselves, rather than pain predicting affect or vice versa.

CONCLUSIONS

Consistent with group-level relationships, experiencing more severe pain relative to an individual's average seems to be associated with more negative affect and less positive affect. However, individuals vary in the size and even direction of these effects. More research is necessary to understand the implications of such variability for the assessment and treatment of chronic pain.