Inability to express intense affect: A common link between depression and pain?

Abstract

Both personality and biology have been proposed as linkages in the relatively strong correlation between depression and chronic pain. We propose that difficulty expressing anger and difficulty controlling intense emotions are predisposing factors linked to these two conditions. Chronic pain and depression may be disturbances or failures to process intensely emotional information, with concomitant disturbances both in the body's immune system and in interpersonal relationships. Depletions of amines and neurotransmitters and dysfunctions of the endogenous opioid system may be variable actions that contribute to both pain and depression. From an exploration of diverse models and proposals, we present a unifying theory of arousal with a view toward developing research questions and paradigms.It is estimated that from 13% to 20% of the U.S. population has clinically significant symptoms of depression and that 3% of the men and nearly 10% of the women have diagnosahle, full blown depressive syndromes (Romano & Turner, 1985). Among patients with medical problems, however, these prevalence rates are consistently higher, reaching their most critical levels among patients with chronic pain. For example, studies suggest that 50% of medical patients have significant depressive symptoms (Nielsen & Williams, 1980) and that well over 20% warrant a diagnosis within the spectrum of depressive syndromes (Raft, Davidson, Towney, Spencer, & Lewis, 1975); additionally, among chronic pain patients a major depressive syndrome can be ruled out only in one-third of the cases (Romano & Turner).Whereas a relation between chronic pain and depression has often been observed, the source, strength, and nature of the linkage between these two conditions remains uncertain. Numerous mechanisms have been proposed as causal links, and the empirical evidence that is available has been invoked as support with various amounts of certitude. Indeed, Romano and Turner (1985) concluded that there is research support for virtually all (often contradictory) hypotheses about the nature of the pain-depression relation: depression provokes pain by increasing pain sensitivity and by lowering pain tolerance thresholds; pain becomes an interchangeable equivalent of depression among patients with certain dispositions; pain serves as a stressor that evokes subsequent depression; and finally, pain and depression are simultaneously occurring experiences that are related only because of coincidentally similar psychological or biological foundations.

Constraining the relative velocity effect using the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey

“…All errors in this Table are Here we show the dependence of the shift parameters α ⊥ and α as well as the growth of structure parameter f σ 8 on the three relative velocity parameters (left) and the change in the power spectrum model (right). The solid lines in the plots on the left show the 'full shape' (FS) fits using the analysis pipeline of Beutler et al (2016b), while the dashed lines use the BAO only analysis pipeline of Beutler et al (2016a). The vertical black dashed lines show the 95% confidence levels for the three relative velocity parameters obtained in this paper (see section 6).…”

“…The power spectrum measurements used in this paper make use of the FFT based estimator (Bianchi et al 2015;Scoccimarro 2015) and are discussed in more detail in Beutler et al (2016b) and Beutler et al (2016a). Here we will summarise these measurements but refer to the above mentioned references for more details.…”

“…To do this we generate power spectrum models as shown in section 4 and fit these models with the BAOonly fitting pipeline of Beutler et al (2016a) and the 'full shape' pipeline of Beutler et al (2016b). The results are shown in Figure 5.…”

“…With the most recent measurements of the BAO scale in the BOSS survey we have now reached 1% precision in two redshift bins (Alam et al 2016;Beutler et al 2016a;Ross et al 2016).…”

Revealing modified gravity signals in matter and halo hierarchical clustering

“…It explains the features and correlations observed in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) [e.g. 1, 2], the primordial nucleosynthesis and light element abundance [3,4], the growth of tiny primordial density perturbations into LSS [5][6][7] and the late-time observed accelerated expansion [8][9][10][11]. However, this spectacular success comes with a high price, since LCDM is mostly phenomenological in its nature.…”