BACKGROUND Women working in the public human service sector in 'overstrained' situations run the risk of musculoskeletal symptoms and long-term sick leave. In order to maintain the level of health and work ability and strengthen the potential resources for health, it is important that employees gain greater control over decisions and actions affecting their health--a process associated with the...

Pain is a major distractor and strongly challenges, not only the patient, but also the treating practitioner to understand what psychological effects are generated. People cope differently with pain especially chronic pain. Enquiry into the patient's personality-based psychological needs at this time of stress and ill health will often give clues as to how they need to change their approach if ...

This study describes the results of a controlled clinical trial involving 44 7- to 14-year-old children with recurrent abdominal pain who were randomly allocated to either cognitive-behavioral family intervention (CBFI) or standard pediatric care (SPC). Both treatment conditions resulted in significant improvements on measures of pain intensity and pain behavior. However, the children receiving...

This literature review was conducted to investigate the association between emotional labor and burnout and to explore the role of personality in this relationship. The results of this review indicate that emotional labor is a job stressor that leads to burnout. Further examination of personality traits, such as self-efficacy and type A behavior pattern, is needed to understand the relationship...

This paper offers a conceptual overview of a neglected field. Evidence is presented to suggest that, globally, addiction is sufficiently stressful to cause pain and suffering to a large but uncounted number of adult affected family members (AFMs), possibly in the region of 100 million worldwide. A non-pathological stress-strain-coping-support model of the experience of AFMs is presented. The mo...

Catastrophizing about pain is defined as ‘‘an exaggerated negative ‘mental set’ brought to bear during actual or anticipated pain experience’’ [25]. It is a salient form of worry, and one that has proven useful in explaining pain severity, disability, and adaptation to treatment in a range of different conditions and settings [7,12]. Catastrophizing involves repeated thought about threat as unc...

The study was designed to assess whether the social context of a pain experience impacted on the relation between catastrophizing and duration of pain behaviour. Based on a communal coping model, the prediction was that the presence of an observer during a pain procedure would differentially influence the display of pain behaviour in high and low catastrophizers. University undergraduates takin...

OBJECTIVE To investigate the use of pain coping strategies by community-living older people with pain in the hip or knee and the mediating role of coping with pain in the relationship between the chronicity of pain and physical disability. METHODS A group of 157 people with pain "in the last month" was identified. Coping with pain was assessed with the Pain Coping Inventory, physical disabili...

Although there is anecdotal evidence for the psychoanalgesic properties of distraction, research evidence is equivocal. Drawing on the clinical and experimental studies of attention-based coping strategies for pain control, and the theoretically driven 'cognitive' models of the human attention system, two experiments are reported. Experiment One demonstrates that chronic pain patients suffering...