Publications by authors named "Marjolein Hanssen"
Background: Previous studies demonstrated that task-specific stress appraisals as well as the more general belief that stress is (mal)adaptive (i.e., stress mindset) can affect the stress response.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous studies found evidence that dispositional optimism is related to lower pain sensitivity. Recent findings suggest that temporarily increasing optimism by means of imagining a positive future may also have pain-alleviating effects.
Objectives: The present experiment was designed to investigate conditioned pain modulation (CPM) as a potential underlying mechanism of this pain-alleviating effect of induced optimism.
Purpose Of Review: Pain is an intense experience that can place a heavy burden on peoples' lives. The identification of psychosocial risk factors led to the development of effective pain treatments. However, effect sizes are modest.
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- People who are naturally more optimistic might feel less pain than those who are not.
- Two studies were done to see how optimism affects pain during cold water tests.
- The researchers found that while optimism did relate to how much pain people felt, their expectations about pain played a role too, but not in the ways they originally thought.
Article Synopsis
- Some studies showed that being optimistic might help people feel less pain, but it wasn't clear if being optimistic actually causes less pain.
- This study tried to see if making people feel more optimistic (by asking them to think about their best future) would result in them feeling less pain during a cold water test.
- The results showed that those who felt more optimistic really did report feeling less pain, and their optimism helped reduce their worries about pain.
Current theoretical models of pain catastrophizing have diverging predictions regarding the role of social context and perceived threat on pain expression. The communal coping model of catastrophizing predicts that high pain catastrophizers display more pain expression in the presence of another, regardless of the threat value of the pain, while a cognitive appraisal model predicts high pain catastrophizers to express more pain when pain has increased threat value, regardless of social context. A 2 x 2 factorial design was used to test the validity of both predictions.
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