Depressed pain patients differ from other depressed groups: examination of cognitive content in a sentence completion task

Rusu, Adina C., Pincus, Tamar and Morley, Stephen (2012) Depressed pain patients differ from other depressed groups: examination of cognitive content in a sentence completion task. Pain, 153 (9), 1898-1904. (doi:10.1016/j.pain.2012.05.034).

Abstract

Depression is a common feature of chronic pain, but there is limited research into the contentand frequency of depressed cognitions in pain patients. A limitation of previous research is the failureto include non-pain depressed comparison groups. The present study used a sentence completion taskto investigate the content of cognition in four groups of participants: with pain and concurrentdepression, pain without depression, depression without pain, and with neither pain nor depression.One hundred and seventy two participants generated sentences to a set of predefined stems. Completeresponses were coded by affective valence (negative, positive and neutral) and health-related content.As predicted, participants with depression (with and without pain) produced more negative responsesthan non-depressed participants (with and without pain); participants with pain (depressed and nondepressed)produced more health responses than those without pain (depressed and controls);participants with depression and pain produced more negative health responses than any other group.The strengths of the current study are in the inclusion of the depressed non-pain group, the use of acomprehensive coding scheme applied by two independent raters, and the presence of depressionvalidated through a diagnostic interview. In contrast to depressed groups without pain, participantswith pain and depression exhibit a cognitive bias specific to negative aspect of health. This focusfacilitates understanding of the relationship between depression and pain processing: The implicationsfor therapeutic interventions are discussed

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Contributors

Author: Tamar Pincus

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