The present study investigated the relation of pain coping strategies to pain, health status, and psychological distress in a group of Osteoarthritis patients with chronic knee pain. Fifty-one patients completed the Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ), the McGill Pain Questionnaire, the Arthritis Impact Measurement Scale (AIMS), and the Symptom Checklist-90 Revised (SCL-90R). Medical status variables included roentgenograph (x-ray) findings, obesity measures, disability status, and chronicity of pain. Factor analysis of the CSQ revealed two factors (Coping Attempts, Pain Control and Rational Thinking) that accounted for 60% of the variance in CSQ responses. Regression analyses controlling for demographic and medical variables identified the Pain Control and Rational Thinking factor as a significant predictor of the outcome measures. Patients scoring high on this factor had lower pain levels, better health status, and lower levels of psychological distress.
Letter encoding is typically viewed as an automatic process that is both obligatory and interference free. However, we have recently shown that letter encoding in a sequential letter-match task does produce interference relative to both no-letter and appropriate intertrial interval baselines. In the sequential letter-match task, subjects may intentionally attend to the first letter, and consequently the interference obtained with this paradigm may reflect the processing demands of deliberate, rather than automatic, processes. Accordingly, the present experiments used a classification task to compare the processing demands of letter primes that were to be ignored and had no predictive utility to letter primes that were to be processed and were highly predictive. When subjects deliberately attended to a letter prime, encoding produced more interference (Experiment 1), but perhaps more important is the fact that either familiar (Experiment 1) or nonfamiliar (Experiment 2) primes produced significant amounts of interference even when the subject was trying to ignore the visual input. The results are consistent with the view that the early perceptual components of encoding are both obligatory and resource demanding.
Secondary task performance was used to evaluate the attentional demands of encoding the first letter in a sequential letter-match task. In Experiments 1 and 2, simple reaction times to secondary task stimuli when the primary letter-match task required letter encoding were slower than when it did not. Thus, unlike earlier studies, comparing secondary task performance between two primary task conditions indicated that letter encoding involves attention. These between-task, letter versus no-letter comparisons that were made in the present study were not possible in previous studies, which used only within-task, letter versus intertrial-interval comparisons. Experiment 3 showed that secondary task performance during the intertrial interval varies with subjects' expectancies. Therefore within-task comparisons will not be sensitive indicators of attentional demands unless expectancies are controlled.
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