Pain catastrophizing (PC) refers to a kind of exaggerated response to pain. According to Michael Sullivan (at the Center for Research on Pain, Disability and Social Integration, at McGill University) PC has 3 components: rumination, magnification, and helplessness. Thus people who would rank high in measures of PC would tend to spend more time thinking about their pain, worrying about it and its consequences, and feeling less control over their pain than those who would rank low in PC.
A recent study administered the Pain Catastrophizing Scale (PCS; Sullivan, Bishop, & Pivik, 1995; a very commonly used measure of PC) to chronic pain patients, their spouses and adult children.
They found that there was a moderate positive correlation between both parents' PCS scores and their children's' scores (r=.37) and that parents' PCS scores explained 20% of the variance in their children's' scores. Of course this means that 80% of the variance in children's scores is attributable to other factors, this is not not trivial amount either.
Interestingly, the mean PCS scores were higher in the patient group than in their spouses or children. This makes sense. After all, it is to be expected that people who live with pain every day will spend more time thinking and worrying about their pain and feeling less in control than people who do not suffer from chronic pain.
A big weakness of this study is that it's cross-sectional, which means that all measures were taken simultaneously, which can only tell us whether different variables (parent PCS scores and children PCS scores) are related, but can tell us nothing about causation. There is a temptation to conclude that parental behavior somehow influences children's behavior but it seems just as plausible that children's reactions to the pain expressed by their parents influences parents' own reactions. Also the mechanism may be observational learning, genetics and perhaps other factors. Still these correlational studies can help clinicians make predictions. And that's important. From a relatively easy to acquire PCS score clinicians would be able to predict which children are at greater risk of high PC themselves.
Kraljevic, S., Banozic, A., Maric, A., Cosic, A., Sapunar, D., & Puljak, L. (2011). Parents’ Pain Catastrophizing is Related to Pain Catastrophizing of Their Adult Children. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine. doi:10.1007/s12529-011-9151-z
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