Children's Catastrophic Thinking About Their Pain Predicts Pain and Disability 6 Months Later

Children’s catastrophic thinking about their pain predicts pain and disability 6 months later

The problem:

The study is carried out to determine if children’s catastrophic thinking about pain would lead to future pain and functional disability in six months. This study is carried out because chronic pain could be disruptive to a person’s life as the manifestation of pain could affect one’s behavior, such as changes in postures and facial distress. Furthermore, catastrophizers would increased the intensity of pain even more which in turn affected one’s lifestyle and normal functioning. Catastrophizers are defined as individuals who had the tendency to magnify or exaggerate the intensity or seriousness of pain (Sullivan et al., 53).
Since pain is a psychological experience and is usually up to an individual to interpret the extent of pain, extreme catastrophic pain could lead to long-term undesirable psychological distress, which in turn resulted in functional disability. Functional disability includes serious sensory impairments and developmental delay. The huge negative impacts on human’s normal functioning caused by one’s catastrophic thinking of pain poses a serious problem and hence, catastrophic thinking about pain is important for investigation.
According to Sullivan al et., the relation between catastrophizing and pain has been reported in younger samples (2001). Children are more prone to catastrophic thinking of pain because they lack the knowledge to adjust to pain when they experienced it. Hence, this study attempts to collect a data of the prospective roles of catastrophic thinking about pain and trait anxiety of various schoolchildren and measure the relations to later pain and disability.
Research design:
The main research methods that are used in this study are correlational study and self-reports.   It is hard to measure pain objectively since the only way to measure it is through self-reports like the McGill Pain Questionnaire, which...