Pain Catastrophizing

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy on pain coping strategies and pain catastrophizing in patients with pain disorder. The research method was a quasi-experimental with pretest-posttest design and a control group and a two-month follow-up. The statistical population of the study included all women with psychosomatic problems and pain who referred to Manoushan and Behsa counseling centers in Tehran. The sample size included 60 (three groups of 20). The research instruments included the Rosenstile and Keefe (1983) Pain Coping Strategies Questionnaire and the Bishop and Pivik (1995) Pain Catastrophe Scale. the emotion-focused experimental group received 12 training sessions and the cognitive-behavioral experimental group received 10 sessions training, but the control group did not receive any intervention during the study.. The results of mixed variance analysis and Benferroni pairwise comparison test showed that both emotion-focused therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy have significant impact on the components of pain reinterpretation, pain catastrophizing, behavioral activity and coping efficiency (P <0.05), but they do not have significant effect on the components of return attention, ignoring pain, prayer and hope, and self-talking (P <0.05). The results also showed that both treatments have significant effect on pain catastrophizing (P <0.05). Also, no significant difference was observed between the two experimental groups (P <0.05). Therefore, the results of the present study show that emotion-focused therapy, like cognitive-behavioral therapy, can be used for patients with pain disorders and improve their cognitive factors.

Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on pain perception and pain catastrophizing in women with breast cancer. Methods: In this quasi-experimental study, 30 women with breast cancer who referred to Imam Khomeini Hospital in Sari in 2024 were studied using convenience sampling. They were then randomly assigned to two groups: the short-term intensive psychodynamic intervention group (15 participants) and the control group (15 participants) without any intervention. The short-term intensive psychodynamic intervention was implemented according to the protocol by Teska et al. (2005) over 16 weekly sessions, each lasting one and a half hours. The samples were assessed at two stages, pre-test and post-test, using the Pain Perception Questionnaire by Schaal et al. (2010) and the Pain Catastrophizing Scale by Rahmati et al. (2017). Data were analyzed using repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance in SPSS24 software. Findings: In the intervention group, the mean scores for pain catastrophizing were (17.20±36.60) and for pain perception were (36.33±80.80) in the pre-test and post-test stages, respectively. Post-test scores significantly decreased compared to pre-test scores in the components of pain catastrophizing and pain perception in the experimental group compared to the control group. Additionally, the results showed that intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy had a statistically significant effect on pain catastrophizing (P<0.05, F=24.41) and pain perception (P<0.05, F=56.201) after adjusting the means of the two groups based on the pre-test score. Conclusion: The results indicate the effectiveness of intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy on pain catastrophizing and pain perception in women with breast cancer. Therefore, this therapy can be used alongside other medical treatment methods in hospitals and clinics dedicated to breast cancer patients to reduce the psychological needs and problems of women with this condition.