User:Anthonyhcole/Psychology of pain

__NOINDEX__ Below is my proposed framework for Psychology and neuropsychology of pain. Please contribute with reference to peer-reviewed articles and/or recent university-level text books (quoting page numbers). =Psychophysics (threshold, tolerance, etc.) and psychophysiology (EEG, skin conductance, etc.)= =Cognition=

Neuropsychological correlates of chronic pain
Neuropsychological tests measure the cognitive and behavioral effects of brain disorders. Functions measured by neuropsychological tests include memory, attention, language, visuo-spatial thinking, executive function, sensory acuity, motor speed and performance, IQ, personality, mood, and temperament. Some of these important brain functions are impaired in chronic pain patients.

Neuropsychological testing of chronic pain patients has found deficits in attention, working memory, mental flexibility, problem solving, information processing speed, and psychomotor speed. Hart et al. (2000) interpret this as indicating an underlying deficit in attention capacity and processing speed. Chronic pain is therefore associated with slower thinking and behaving, and poorer performance on complex attention-demanding tasks. Presently there is no scientific consensus as to whether chronic pain causes these neuropsychological deficits, or whether it is only patients with these pre-existing deficits that go on to develop chronic pain.

Psychogenisis
=Emotion and mood=

Anxiety
=Behavior=

The effect of behavior on pain
=Social feeling= When you see others suffer, you suffer, and your anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (thought to embody, among other things, the aversive element of physical pain) is activated vigorously. The ACC is also vigorously active when you receive a social insult, as when you are excluded from a game. These two social feelings, empathy and belonging feeling, are the neural foundation of moral behaviour. They are a successful mutation of the physical pain system. For those who have inherited this mutation, a tear in the social fabric hurts like a torn ligament. Pain in your social fabric is pain in you. This mutation produces protective, even self-sacrificial behaviour, as far as the social fabric extends. Parents with healthy social feeling systems nurture their young; for the want of healthy social feeling systems, psychopaths prey. Are these social feeling systems in any way affected when the physical pain system, of which they form an extension, is activated by pain? That is, does physical pain affect your experience of empathy and belonging? And, conversely, does the state of your empathy and belonging feeling systems affect your experience of physical pain?

Social support
=Pleasure= =References=