None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
When people experience pain, attention is continually sequestered by pain, or the expectation of pain. This attentional priority places a demand on cognitive resources and impairs people’s performance at cognitively demanding tasks, including regulating the strong negative emotions often associated with pain. The long-term demands that chronic pain places on attention can eventually deplete self-regulatory resources and increase pain-related cognitive impairment. It is yet unclear if such an effect holds for emotional-regulatory ability. Given the cognitive demands of pain, it is expected that emotional-regulatory ability will be impaired to varying degrees by both acute and chronic physical discomfort, similar to that occurring in pain. To determine this, chronic pain patients and age/gender matched controls will be compared on measures of personality characteristics, and their ability to regulate their emotional expressions before and after a task designed to evoke sensations similar to pain. This matched control group will help determine if any effects on emotional-regulatory ability associated with the pain-like task are unique to chronic pain or due to the effects of the pain-like task in general.
Interventions
The intervention will comprise a weight lifting task. This task will involve:
a) A modified dead-lift from the floor to standing of a bag containing a weight. The bag will be held whilst in a standing position until the end of the task.
b) A 6kg weight will be used as this is tolerated easily by most people, including those people with chronic pain.
c) There is only one repetition, with the maximum time able to hold the weight in standing until failure, with participants encouraged to do thei
The intervention will comprise a weight lifting task. This task will involve: a) A modified dead-lift from the floor to standing of a bag containing a weight. The bag will be held whilst in a standing position until the end of the task. b) A 6kg weight will be used as this is tolerated easily by most people, including those people with chronic pain. c) There is only one repetition, with the maximum time able to hold the weight in standing until failure, with participants encouraged to do their best. d) The task will be individually supervised by a physiotherapist. e) The task will involve only a single session, with the time determined by the participants endurance.
Sponsors
Department of Health Psychology, University of Auckland
Study design
Allocation
Non-randomised trial
Intervention model
Other
Primary purpose
Diagnosis
Masking
Blinded (masking used) (Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
No
Inclusion criteria
Inclusion criteria for the chronic pain sample are: that the participant has had pain for at least six months; and be fluent in English so they can complete the English-language validated questionnaire measures. Inclusion criteria for the matched, pain-free sample are the same as the chronic pain sample, with the exception of not experiencing more than seven consecutive days of pain within the last month.
Exclusion criteria
Exclusion criteria identify those participant characteristics that might lead to adverse effects from the weight-lifting task or confound interpretation of the study findings. These criteria apply equally to both the chronic-pain and matched control samples. Exclusion criteria include: physical comorbidities that might hinder participation, such as facial nerve pathology that prevents emotional expression and mobility issues that have not been adequately addressed in the study design; psychological comorbidities that expert clinicians judge as possibly leading to adverse pain experiences, emotional distress or that confound interpretation of findings (e.g. psychosis, disorders of thought or disorders of motivation); and clinically identified severe health complications (e.g. cancers) from which study participation may cause needless distress and that would also could confound interpretation of findings.
Outcome results
None listed