Shifting the perspective: how positive thinking can help diminish the negative effects of pain.

Objectives: The field of pain psychology has taken significant steps forward during the last decades and the way we think about how to treat chronic pain has radically shifted from a biomedical perspective to a biopsychosocial model. This change in perspective has led to a surge of accumulating research showing the importance of psychological factors as determinants for debilitating pain. Vulnerability factors, such as pain-related fear, pain catastrophizing and escape/avoidant behaviours may increase the risk of disability.

The effectiveness and equivalence of different versions of a brief online Best Possible Self (BPS) manipulation to temporary increase optimism and affect.

Background And Objectives: The Best Possible Self (BPS) has been found to be an effective manipulation to temporarily improve optimism and affect. The BPS has been used in different formats. In some versions, participants just write about their best possible future, while in others this is combined with imagery.

The relation between parental chronic pain, pain-related attention and interpretation biases in pain-free adolescents.

Background: Children of chronic pain patients run greater risk for developing chronic pain themselves. Exposure to chronic pain of the parent might install cognitive (e.g.

The effects of experimental pain and induced optimism on working memory task performance.

Background/aims: Pain can interrupt and deteriorate executive task performance. We have previously shown that experimentally induced optimism can diminish the deteriorating effect of cold pressor pain on a subsequent working memory task (i.e.

Increasing Optimism Protects Against Pain-Induced Impairment in Task-Shifting Performance.

Unlabelled: Persistent pain can lead to difficulties in executive task performance. Three core executive functions that are often postulated are inhibition, updating, and shifting. Optimism, the tendency to expect that good things happen in the future, has been shown to protect against pain-induced performance deterioration in executive function updating.

Increasing optimism abolishes pain-induced impairments in executive task performance.

Coping with the demands of pain diminishes self-regulatory capacity and causes self-regulatory fatigue, which then leads to deteriorated executive task performance. It has been suggested that optimism can counteract the depletion of self-regulatory capacity. This study employed a 2 (optimism/no optimism)×2 (pain/no pain) between-subjects design to explore whether (1) experimentally induced pain (cold pressor task) deteriorates subsequent executive task performance, and (2) whether an optimism induction can counteract this sustained deteriorating effect of pain on executive task performance.