Neuroticism and the pain-mood relation in rheumatoid arthritis: Insights from a prospective daily study.

Abstract

For 75 consecutive days, 54 Ss with rheumatoid arthritis supplied daily reports of their mood and joint pain. After aggregating daily reports, the relation between chronic mood and chronic pain remained statistically significant when controlling for neuroticism, depression, disease activity, disability, and characteristic responses to increasing pain. Findings of a path analysis suggest that (a) individuals higher in neuroticism experience more chronic distress regardless of their responses to pain, their pain intensity, and depressive symptomatology, and (b) the relation between neuroticism and chronic pain is mediated by the propensity of high-neuroticism individuals to catastrophize their pain. Within-subject analyses that controlled for autocorrelation and linear trends in the time series revealed that 40% of the Ss experienced significantly worse moods on more painful days. Although individuals higher in neuroticism reported more intense pain and more negative mood, their daily mood was less strongly linked to their daily pain.

Coping with arthritis: Current status and critique

“…Some studies of individuals coping with other MANNE AND ZAUTRA life stressors have suggested that certain personality traits, including neuroticism, predict coping choices (36). For example, in arthritis patients, internal locus of control has been related to active coping (17) and neuroticism has been associated with wishful thinking and catastrophizing (37). Bolger (36) sees these findings as evidence that coping is a personality process that actualizes dispositional differences during encounters with stressful events.…”

Unique clinical and psychological correlates of fibromyalgia tender points and joint tenderness in rheumatoid arthritis

“…In a previous study, we found internal consistencies for the neuroticism subscales ranged from 0.72 to 0.83 and a principal components analysis identified a single factor with an eigenvalue of 3.63 that loaded higher than 0.5 on each of the subscales. Patients scoring higher on this measure reported more depressive symptoms and pain, and more disturbed daily mood independent of their pain (32). Neuroticism scores also correlate with somatic complaints, but not with more objective indicators of disease (31).…”

Dynamic pain–emotion relations in chronic pain: a theoretical review of moderation studies

“…In Affleck et al's (1992a) study, high neuroticism individuals showed lower correlations between reports of pain and mood, indicating that the distress reported by individuals high in neuroticism is partly independent of pain. Lombardo, Tan, Jensen, & Anderson (2005) expected low self-efficacy to be related to high maladaptive anger management, but found that this relation holds only at low pain levels, while at high pain intensity there were no differences in anger management between low and high self-efficacy.…”

“…In a heterogeneous sample, pain catastrophizing amplified the relation between focusing attention on pain and pain threshold and tolerance during an experimental coldpressor task, but not pain reporting (Michael and Burns, 2004). Affleck, Tennen, Urrows, & Higgins (1992a) showed that increased neuroticism led to lower correlations between pain and mood, while illness duration, disability, disease activity and average daily pain all led to higher pain-mood correlations. To anticipate, these opposite results are consistent with the desynchrony phenomenon discussed in section six.…”

“…For example, neuroticism is presented as the moderator due to being a stable trait in some studies (Affleck et al, 1992a), while other interpretations view stress as moderating the relation between neuroticism as a stable trait and negative affect as outcome, as "stress creates a context within which linkages among all affect-laden features are strengthened, including the association between personality dispositions, such as neuroticism and negative affective states" (Zautra et al, 1997, p. 91).…”