The impact of music-imaginative pain treatment (MIPT) on psychophysical affect regulation - A single case study.

Music-imaginative Pain Treatment (MIPT) is part of the multi-professional treatment plan for hospitalised patients in departments for psychosomatic medicine. MIPT is an intervention that encourages the patient to create music representing pain and relief from pain and promotes active engagement and self-reflection. This single case study of a 46-year-old female patient diagnosed with chronic pain disorder with somatic and psychological factors includes narrative, demographic, psychometric, and cardiophysiological data.

Improvement of pain experience and changes in heart rate variability through music-imaginative pain treatment.

Music-imaginative Pain Treatment (MIPT) is a form of music therapy addressing pain experience and affective attitudes toward pain. It includes two self-composed music pieces: one dedicated to the pain experience (pain music, PM) and the other to healing imagination (healing music, HM). Our non-experimental study addresses patients with chronic somatoform pain disorders participating in MIPT.

Unwillingly traumatizing: is there a psycho-traumatologic pathway from general surgery to postoperative maladaptation?

Background: Surgery may possibly be undermined by psychologic, psychiatric and psychosomatic problems, as long as these problems interfere with a patient's capacity to cope with surgery adaptively. Recent studies have shown that interpersonal trauma, e.g.

The Pain Paradox of Borderline Personality and Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA): Recruiting Borderline Personality Organization to Predict the One-Year Postoperative Outcome.

Background: TKA is a common treatment for arthropathies of the knee; however, its results are compromised by psychosocial equivalents of pain: prior research suggests persistent pain and dysfunction after TKA not only to be linked to psychological symptoms such as depression or anxiety but also to psychodynamic determinants of borderline personality, namely borderline personality organization. Osteoarthritis (OA) and Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), the main indications for TKA, are themselves linked to personality factors and disorders, e.g.

Attachment-specific speech patterns induce dysphoric mood changes in the listener as a function of individual differences in attachment characteristics and psychopathology.

Objectives: Early childhood experiences influence cognitive-emotional development, with insecure attachment predisposing to potential psychopathologies. We investigated whether narratives containing attachment-specific speech patterns shape listeners' emotional responses and social intentions.

Design: First, 149 healthy participants listened to three narratives characteristic for secure, insecure-preoccupied, and insecure-dismissing attachment.

Dissociation and Pain-Catastrophizing: Absorptive Detachment as a Higher-Order Factor in Control of Pain-Related Fearful Anticipations Prior to Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA).

Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) is the ultima-ratio therapy for knee-osteoarthritis (OA), which is a paradigmatic condition of chronic pain. A hierarchical organization may explain the reported covariation of pain-catastrophizing (PC) and dissociation, which is a trauma-related psychopathology. This study tests the hypotheses of an overlap and hierarchical organization of the two constructs, PC and dissociation, respectively, using the Western Ontario and McMaster Universities Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), the Childhood Trauma Screener (CTS), a shortened version of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (FDS-20), the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI-18), the Pain-Catastrophizing Scale (PCS), and the Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia (TSK) in 93 participants with knee-OA and TKA.

Negative Affect, Type D Personality, Quality of Life, and Dysfunctional Outcomes of Total Knee Arthroplasty.

Background: Type D personality (TDP) is a sign of tapered stress and compromises treatment outcomes including those of hip arthroplasty. The common dissatisfaction with total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is predicted by fear avoidance, pain catastrophizing and emotional lability, with poor quality of life (QoL) reflecting these strains. This study is the first to investigate the influence of TDP on TKA assuming (1) negative affect (NA) to be linked to fear avoidance and to increased dissatisfaction with TKA and (2) the expression of NA and social inhibition (SI) to not be stable over time.

Exposure to attachment narratives dynamically modulates cortical arousal during the resting state in the listener.

Background: Affective stimulation entails changes in brain network patterns at rest, but it is unknown whether exogenous emotional stimulation has a prolonged effect on the temporal dynamics of endogenous cortical arousal. We therefore investigated differences in cortical arousal in the listener following stimulation with different attachment-related narratives.

Methods: Resting-state EEG was recorded from sixteen healthy subjects for ten minutes each with eyes closed: first at baseline and then after passively listening to three affective narratives from strangers about their early childhood experiences (prototypical for insecure-dismissing, insecure-preoccupied, and secure attachment).

[A review on psychosomatic factors affecting the outcome after total knee-arthroplasty (TKA)].

Unlabelled: A review on psychosomatic factors affecting the outcome after total knee-arthroplasty (TKA) Objectives: In today's ageing Western societies, arthroplasty is a common treatment for endstage osteoarthritis. Despite highly developed implants and surgery, however, this treatment does not always succeed in relieving pain and restoring joint function, i.e.

Changes in brain activity of somatoform disorder patients during emotional empathy after multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Somatoform disorder patients show a variety of emotional disturbances including impaired emotion recognition and increased empathic distress. In a previous paper, our group showed that several brain regions involved in emotional processing, such as the parahippocampal gyrus and other regions, were less activated in pre-treatment somatoform disorder patients (compared to healthy controls) during an empathy task. Since the parahippocampal gyrus is involved in emotional memory, its decreased activation might reflect the repression of emotional memories (which-according to psychoanalytical concepts-plays an important role in somatoform disorder).

Contemporary perspectives on psychosomatics in Germany: A commentary on Karen Gubb's paper, "Psychosomatics today: a review of contemporary theory and practice".

Karen Gubb's (2013) review focuses on contemporary developments in psychoanalytic theory and practice in relation to psychosomatics, starting with some historical remarks, and Paris School with the Attachment approach. This paper examines the question of how the German scene fits into the issues raised in Gubb's discussion. From a historical point of view, psychosomatic thinking had already come into existence at the beginning of the twentieth century in internal medicine, influenced not only by Freud's ideas, but also by holistic philosophical approaches, anthropology, and semiotic systems theory as well.

[Pregnancy experiences of women with pregnancy-induced hypertension].

Objectives: The study assesses the experience of pregnancy of women who have pregnancy induced hypertension (PIH) compared to women with an uncomplicated course of pregnancy.

Methods: 21 women were retrospectively investigated between 5 and 13 months after giving birth via a semistandardised interview focussing on the personal experience of pregnancy. The interviews were analysed by means of qualitative content analysis.

Altered brain activity during emotional empathy in somatoform disorder.

Somatoform disorder patients suffer from impaired emotion recognition and other emotional deficits. Emotional empathy refers to the understanding and sharing of emotions of others in social contexts. It is likely that the emotional deficits of somatoform disorder patients are linked to disturbed empathic abilities; however, little is known so far about empathic deficits of somatoform patients and the underlying neural mechanisms.

[Surviving the initial phase: subjective theories of illness in patients suffering from acute leukaemia at the end of initial inpatient treatment].

Objectives: Studies concentrating on the temporal dependence of subjective concepts during oncological treatment are underrepresented. Subjective interpretation contexts develop in the course of illness. The study focuses on the ideal-typical gestalt of these contents.

[The usefulness of the Brief Symptom Inventory 18 (BSI-18) in psychotherapeutic patients].

The BSI-18, an abridged version of the Brief Symptom Inventory of Derogatis, contains the 3 six items scales Somatization, Depression, Anxiety, and the Global Score (GSI). In a sample of N=638 psychotherapeutic patients, reliability and validity were proven. Reliability of the 3 scales was good: Somatization α=0.

Multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy induces normalization of reward related activity in somatoform disorder.

Objectives: Somatoform disorder patients demonstrate a disturbance in the balance between internal and external information processing, with a decreased focus on external stimulus processing. We investigated brain activity of somatoform disorder patients, during the processing of rewarding external events, paying particular attention to the effects of inpatient multimodal psychodynamic psychotherapy.

Methods: Using fMRI, we applied a reward task that required fast reactions to a target stimulus in order to obtain monetary rewards; a control condition contained responses without the opportunity to gain rewards.

The lack of negative affects as an indicator for identity disturbance in borderline personality disorder: a preliminary report.

Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder (BPD) suffer from instability of their relationships, their affectivity and their identity. The purpose of the study was to investigate negative affects and identity disturbance in patients with BPD and in patients without personality disorder using questionnaire data and interview data.

Sampling And Methods: Twelve patients with BPD and 12 patients with major depressive disorder without any personality disorder were assessed with the Structured Interview of Personality Organization (STIPO) and questionnaires (Inventory of Personality Organization, Beck Depression Inventory, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory).

[Who has more anxiety concerning a shortened life span: terminal cancer patients or those in curative therapy?].

The aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a difference in the amount of fear of the advancement (progression) and return (relapse) of cancer shown by terminal cancer patients and those in curative therapy. The cohort consists of 291 rehabilitation patients, main diagnoses were colonic/rectal-, breast- and prostate cancer. The patients were questioned using the fear of progression questionnaire (PA-F-KF) and a Five-Item Fear of Relapse/Recurrence Scale.

From symptom relief to interpersonal change: Treatment outcome and effectiveness in inpatient psychotherapy.

This study evaluated the impact of psychodynamic inpatient psychotherapy on patients' psychological distress and interpersonal problems during the course of treatment and 1 year later. A total of 156 patients were assessed with the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised and the Inventory of Interpersonal Problems at intake, 4 weeks later, and at the end of therapy. The follow-up assessment was conducted 1 year later.

Alexithymia and outcome in psychotherapy.

Background: About 25% of all patients seeking psychotherapeutic treatment are considered to be alexithymic. Alexithymia has been assumed to be negatively associated with therapeutic outcome. On the other hand, it is unclear to which extent alexithymia itself may be modified by psychotherapeutic interventions.

Impaired psychosocial outcome of donors after living donor liver transplantation: a qualitative case study.

Adult-to-adult living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) of the right hepatic lobe has been developing into an established therapy for treating pre-terminal liver diseases. There is little experience available on the psychosocial outcome of living donors. The aim of this first qualitative case study was to investigate the patterns for impaired psychosocial outcome in donors after LDLT.