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Pain in the Workplace, Risk Factors for Chronicity, and Psychosocial Factors

  • Reference work entry
Encyclopedia of Pain

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Synonyms

Emotional factors; Personality; Psychological factors

Definition

Psychosocial factors, including individual differences (i.e., personality), premorbid psychological diagnoses, coping resources and strategies, cognitive (e.g., beliefs, attitudes, perceptions, expectancies), emotional (i.e., depression, anxiety), and behavioral (i.e., responses by significant others) variables, all have the potential to predispose one to, and to affect, chronicity following a work-related injury.

Characteristics

As is so often the case in healthcare, when physical factors are insufficient to predict symptoms, psychological factors are considered. For example, Burton et al. (1995) demonstrated that, for acute back pain patients presenting in a primary care setting, conventional clinical information predicted outcome disability scores for only 10 % of the cases, compared to psychosocial measures that accounted for 59 % of the cases. The failure of injury severity to account for the majority of...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology & Pain Research, University of Washington, Box 356540, Seattle, WA, 98195, USA

    Dennis C. Turk

Authors
  1. Dennis C. Turk
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Correspondence to Dennis C. Turk .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anesthesiology, Center for Pain Research, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Gerald F. Gebhart

  2. Physiologisches Institut der, Universität Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany

    Robert F. Schmidt

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Turk, D.C. (2013). Pain in the Workplace, Risk Factors for Chronicity, and Psychosocial Factors. In: Gebhart, G.F., Schmidt, R.F. (eds) Encyclopedia of Pain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28753-4_3107

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