Le fonctionnement émotionnel lors de la douleur chronique : État de la question. = Emotional processing in chronic pain: The state of the art.
Résumé
Pain mobilizes numerous psychological variables,which involve the interaction of cognitions (attention, interpretation of the situation), feelings (fear, anger, anxiety) and behaviors (immobilization, avoidance). These various aspects generally have an adaptive role, necessary for the conservation of the body. However, in chronic pain, these mechanisms can become dysfunctional and cannot answer their initial function, and can even influence the appearance of psychopathologies. In this framework, feelings and emotional processing play an important role in the modulation of the intensity of sensory and emotional aspects of pain. In this particular case, suppression, emotional avoidance and alexithymia are associated with a greater intensity of the sensory or emotional aspects of pain. Although recent studies have employed relatively rigorous methodological devices, sometimes they used many tools which do not yet measure the dysfunction directly. Furthermore, emotional suppression was mainly studied during anger, which constitutes a specific phenomenon that cannot be generalized to all emotions. New studies are to be envisaged which would allow in particular the study of the effect of unregulated (insufficient control of experience or emotional expression) and untreated (arousing intrusive thoughts and the obstinacy of the emotional experience) emotions, defined by Baker et al. (2007), and the use of a tool permitting the differentiation and measurement of all possible dysfunctions. They could also allow for the control of the concomitant presence of various emotional dysfunctions in participants. Ideally, the realization of forward-looking studies could define the nature of the links between emotional dysfunctions and chronic pain. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)