No abstract

The Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (KIMS) is a well-validated multidimensional questionnaire measuring dimensions of mindfulness on four scales: Observing, Describing, Act With Awareness, and Accept Without Judgment. Even though the KIMS has been used in several clinical studies no information is available about the psychometric properties in different clinical samples. The present study includes two clinical samples: a German sample of people diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, or major depression and an English sample of people diagnosed with recurrent depression. Results of confirmatory factor analysis offer good support for the hypothesized model of four correlated factors, whereas the model of one general underlying mindfulness factor as a second order construct was not confirmed. Furthermore, our analyses revealed that the KIMS scales show high internal consistency and that all KIMS scales are sensitive to change in a subsample of participants taking part in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy.

The aim of the present study was to assess the predictive power of the processing of pain-related information, comprising concepts of hypervigilance to pain, pain catastrophizing, and pain-related anxiety (questionnaires) as well as attentional processes related to pain-related stimuli (dot-probe task) in explaining individual differences in experimental pain sensitivity (pressure/thermal pain threshold). In 160 healthy participants (ages 13-61; 80 females), results of hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that self-reported hypervigilance contributed significantly to the prediction of pain sensitivity, whereas pain catastrophizing and anxiety did not. However, inconsistent with prediction, the effect was in the opposite direction, indicating that vigilance to pain sensations or stimuli is associated with lower pain sensitivity in healthy individuals. Entering the attentional bias indices from the dot-probe task showed that an increased bias to pain words is related to higher experimental pain sensitivity, which confirms the hypothesis.

Attentional avoidance of emotionally negative stimuli prior to surgery proved to be a powerful predictor of acute postoperative pain reflected by the consumption of analgesics; this time in a sample of aged patients with various but mainly malign diagnoses. This measure outperformed traditional predictors like depression, anxiety, as well as pain catastrophizing, and deserves further attention.

PurposeThe way individuals attend to pain is known to have a considerable impact on the experience and chronification of pain. One method to assess the habitual “attention to pain” is the Pain Vigilance and Awareness Questionnaire (PVAQ). With the present study, we aimed to test the psychometric properties of the German version of the PVAQ across pain-free samples and across patients with acute and chronic pain.MethodTwo samples of pain-free individuals (student sample (N = 255)/non-student sample (N = 362)) and two clinical pain samples (acute pain patients (N = 105)/chronic pain patients (N = 36)) were included in this cross-sectional evaluation of the German PVAQ. Factor structure was assessed using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Reliability was assessed using internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha). Construct validity was tested by assessing correlations between PVAQ and theoretically related constructs.ResultsExploratory factor analysis (non-student sample) and confirmatory factor analysis (student sample, acute pain patient sample) suggested that a two-factor solution best fitted our data (“attention to pain,” “attention to changes in pain”). Internal consistency ranged from acceptable to good in all four samples. As hypothesized, the PVAQ correlated significantly with theoretically related constructs in all four samples, suggesting good construct validity in pain-free individuals and in pain patients.ConclusionThe German PVAQ shows good psychometric properties across samples of pain-free individuals and patients suffering from pain that are comparable to PVAQ versions of other languages. Thus, the German PVAQ seems to be a measure of pain vigilance equally valid as found in other countries.