PAIN BEHAVIOR, SPOUSE RESPONSIVENESS, AND MARITAL SATISFACTION IN PATIENTS WITH RHEUMATOID-ARTHRITIS

Although the pain behavior of some diagnostic groups has been shown to be reactive to social influences, the reactivity of pain behavior in a rheumatoid arthritis (RA) population remains an open question. The a uthors in this article combined laboratory and self-report assessment techniques to examine the extent to which the pain report and behavior of 52 RA patients was susceptible to influence of social factors with in the marital unit The authors' findings suggest that (a) different t ypes of spouse responsiveness (e.g., solicitous, punishing) may be vie wed differently by the RA population than more general chronic pain po pulations; (b) the patient's perception of spouse responsiveness is a significant predictor of the pain behavior, whereas the spouse's perce ption of these same behaviors is not; and (c) the patient's perception of the spouse's responsive behavior adds significantly to the predict ion of pain behavior over a model based on ''disease impact'' variable s alone.