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The effect of resilience on task persistence and performance during repeated exposure to heat pain

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Abstract

The Pain Resilience Scale was recently developed to assess dimensions of resilience critical to pain-related adaptation and was found to predict experimental pain sensitivity in a pain-free population. Pain resilience has also been theoretically linked to behavioral persistence despite pain. To date, however, this hypothesis has not been experimentally tested. To address this gap in the literature, in the current study 105 healthy young adults underwent a baseline administration of the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), a stressful mental arithmetic task, delivered with somatosensory distraction (i.e. detection of warm and cool thresholds), and finally simultaneous administration of the PASAT and a series of five heat pain threshold assessments. Results of hierarchical multiple linear regressions indicated that, after controlling for scores on a baseline PASAT and pain sensitivity, pain resilience was positively related to task persistence, B = 0.12, p = 0.04, and task performance, B = 0.14, p = 0.04, on the PASAT. These findings provide novel support for the relationship between pain resilience and behavioral perseverance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Ohio University, 251 Porter Hall, Athens, OH, 45701, USA

    P. Maxwell Slepian & Christopher R. France

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  1. P. Maxwell Slepian
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  2. Christopher R. France
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Correspondence to Christopher R. France.

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P. Maxwell Slepian and Christopher R. France declare that they do not have any conflict of interest.

Human and animal rights and Informed consent

All procedures followed were in accordance with ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national) and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2000. Informed consent was obtained from all patients for being included in the study.

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Slepian, P.M., France, C.R. The effect of resilience on task persistence and performance during repeated exposure to heat pain. J Behav Med 40, 894–901 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-017-9854-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-017-9854-y

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