Contribuição de fatores internos na precisão dos relatos de dor

Abstract

Individuals vary in their ability to report inner body states, such as pain. Treister and colleagues (2017) developed the Focused Analgesia Selection Test (FAST), a procedure aiming to measure the variability on pain reporting, i.e. the amount of variation reported for the same noxious stimuli. Indeed, lower pain reporting variability may be related to more reliable pain reports. The current study aimed at investigating the relation between pain reporting variability and memory mechanisms, specifically, remembered pain of a past painful event, memory abilities and psychological factors currently related to pain. Healthy volunteers were recruited and assessed in three moments. In the first session, thirty participants were assessed with FAST procedure, Cold Pressor Test (CPT) and completed questionnaires assessing psychological characteristics, State Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS) and Profile of Mood States (POMS). Fifteen days after this visit, nineteen participants opened a letter given to them in the previous session containing a mood scale (POMS) and a question about the maximum pain they remember having experienced during CPT. The second session, also with nineteen participants, took place a month after the first. Neuropsychological memory tests were held (digit span and verbal and visual memory of Weschler Memory Scale III) and CPT was repeated. The results indicated that individuals with lower pain report variability remembered the pain they felt in the past more accurately, suggesting reliable pain reporters are less influenced by biases to pain memory than reporters that show a high variability in pain ratings. Reliable pain reporters also showed higher visual short-term memory abilities, pointing in the direction of the importance of memory in a multisensory module responsible for subjective magnitude assessment. Finally, higher depression and melancholic mood was correlated with pain reporting reliability, highlighting the role “depressive realism” in pain assessment.

Date of Award	7 Jan 2020
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Rita Canaipa (Supervisor) & Roi Treister (Co-Supervisor)