ENDORSEMENT AND MEMORY BIAS OF SELF-REFERENTIAL PAIN STIMULI IN DEPRESSED PAIN PATIENTS

This study investigates information processing in chronic pain patients by comparing the responses of depressed pain patients, non-depressed pain patients and non-pain control subjects. Each subject contributed two scores: endorsement of adjectives as descriptors of themselves and their best-friends; and free recall of the presented words. The stimuli consisted of depression-related, pain-related and neutral control adjectives, and each content category was split into negative and positive valence. The four-way interaction between group, reference, content and valence was significant both in the recall data and the endorsement data. Further analysis revealed that depressed pain patients exhibited a bias towards self-referential negative pain words, but not towards self-referential negative depression information. These results are interpreted in line with content specificity theory of information processing and have implications for targeting cognitive interventions with pain patients.