Elsevier

The Journal of Pain

Volume 18, Issue 5, May 2017, Pages 597-604
The Journal of Pain

Original Report
Linguistic Indicators of Pain Catastrophizing in Patients With Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain

This work was presented, in part, as a poster at an annual meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2017.01.001Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Linguistic indicators of patient pain catastrophizing were examined.

  • Word count analysis of patients' essays about their life with pain was conducted.

  • Pain catastrophizing was associated with several distinct linguistic markers.

Abstract

The present study examined markers of pain catastrophizing in the word use of patients with chronic pain. Patients (N = 71) completed the Pain Catastrophizing Scale and wrote about their life with pain. Quantitative word count analysis examined whether the essays contained linguistic indicators of catastrophizing. Bivariate correlations showed that catastrophizing was associated with greater use of first person singular pronouns, such as “I” (r = .27, P ≤ .05) and pronouns referencing other people (r = .28, P ≤ .05). Catastrophizing was further significantly associated with greater use of sadness (r = .35, P ≤ .01) and anger (r = .30, P ≤ .05) words. No significant relationships with positive emotion and cognitive process words were evident. Controlling for patients' engagement in the writing task, gender, age, pain intensity, and neuroticism in multiple regression, the linguistic categories together uniquely explained 13.6% of the variance in catastrophizing (P ≤ .001). First person singular pronouns (β = .24, P ≤ .05) and words relating to sadness (β = .25, P ≤ .05) were significant, and pronouns referencing other people (β = .19, P ≤ .10) were trending. The results suggest that pain catastrophizing is associated with a “linguistic fingerprint” that can be discerned from patients’ natural word use.

Perspective

Quantitative word count analysis examined whether pain catastrophizing is reflected in patients’ written essays about living with pain. Catastrophizing was associated with more first person singular pronouns, more pronouns referencing other people, and more expressions of sadness and anger. The results can help understand how catastrophizing translates into communicative behaviors.

Key words

Pain
pain catastrophizing
word use
linguistic
text analysis
assessment
Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count

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This work was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases (R01 AR066200).

The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare.