SENSORY AND AFFECTIVE PREDICTORS OF OVERALL PAIN AND EMOTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH AFFECTIVE PAIN

Objective: Psychological scaling techniques consistently produce separ ate ratings for sensory and affective components of pain. This study e xamines the relative contributions of these components to pain as a wh ole and the contributions of different emotions to the affective compo nent of pain. Design: The design was correlational. Visual analogue sc ales were used to quantify overall pain, sensory pain, affective pain, and individual emotions. These data lent themselves to regression tec hniques for expressing pain as a function of sensation and affect as a function of emotion types. Setting: Data were collected at the Pain C linic within the Department of Physical Medicine at the Ohio State Uni versity. Patients: Subjects were 40 chronic pain sufferers admitted to an inpatient pain management program. Results and Conclusions: Rating s of overall pain were not a simple summation of sensory and affective ratings, but a linearly additive function of both component ratings e ach with a unique weighting. The affective component of pain was a fun ction of three differentially weighted sets of emotions, anger, fear, and sadness being most salient. Implications arise for the broader ass essment of chronic pain and the treatment of specific emotions that ma y be particularly associated with the pain.