Although chronic pain and depression commonly co-occur, causal relationships have yet to be established. A reciprocal relationship, with depression increasing pain and vice versa, is most frequently suggested, but experimental evidence is needed to validate such a view. The most straightforward approach would be a demonstration that increasing or decreasing depressed mood predictably modifies pain responses. The current experiment tested whether experimentally induced depressed and happy mood have differential effects on pain ratings and tolerance in 55 patients suffering from chronic back pain. Participants were randomly assigned to depressed, neutral (control) or elated mood induction conditions. They completed a physically passive baseline task prior to receiving mood induction, then a clinically relevant physically active task (holding a heavy bag) to elicit pain responses and tolerance. Measures were taken immediately after the baseline task and immediately after the mood induction to assess the changes in mood, pain ratings and tolerance before and after the experimental manipulation. Results indicate that the induction of depressed mood resulted in significantly higher pain ratings at rest and lower pain tolerance, whilst induced happy mood resulted in significantly lower pain ratings at rest and greater pain tolerance. Correlations between changes in mood on the one hand and changes in pain response and pain tolerance on the other hand were consistent with these findings. It is concluded that, in chronic back pain patients, experimentally induced negative mood increases self-reported pain and decreases tolerance for a pain-relevant task, with positive mood having the opposite effect.

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The phenomenological information both informs and supports the idea that the cognitive-behavioural model of health anxiety can be adapted for the understanding of and development of treatments for pain patients with health anxiety. The findings also challenge the common practice of 'lumping' pain patients into a single group and underline the importance of matching treatments to the patients' psychological characteristics.

IntroductionThere is a need to comprehensively examine and evaluate the quality of the psychometric properties of school connectedness measures to inform school based assessment and intervention planning.ObjectiveTo systematically review the literature on the psychometric properties of self-report measures of school connectedness for students aged six to 14 years.MethodsA systematic search of five electronic databases and gray literature was conducted. The COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of heath Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) taxonomy of measurement properties was used to evaluate the quality of studies and a pre-set psychometric criterion was used to evaluate the overall quality of psychometric properties.ResultsThe measures with the strongest psychometric properties was the School Climate Measure and the 35-item version Student Engagement Instrument exploring eight and 12 (of 15) school connectedness components respectively.ConclusionsThe overall quality of psychometric properties was limited suggesting school connectedness measures available require further development and evaluation.