Staying positive may help kids deal with pain
It may be mind over matter when it comes to children’s ability to cope with pain, a study suggests.
Researchers found that children and teenagers who said they typically dealt with pain through positive thinking were able to better tolerate uncomfortable circumstances, like pressure on a finger or heat against their skin.
Those who typically turned to less-positive coping strategies—like worrying inwardly or to someone else—had less pain tolerance. [abs & p 711, par 4]
The findings, according to the study authors, suggest that teaching kids positive coping tactics could help them deal with short-term pain, including pain from injections or other medical procedures. [email]
Dr. Qian Lu and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles report the findings in the Journal of Pain.
For their study, the researchers recruited 244 healthy children and teenagers between the ages of 8 and 18. They used a standard questionnaire to gauge the children’s typical reactions to pain that lasted hours to days. [p 711, par 4]
Some of these reactions included positive thinking ("say to myself, things will be ok,” for example); seeking emotional support ("let my feelings out to a friend"); internalizing/catastrophizing ("worry that I will always be in pain"); and finding a distraction ("do something fun").
The children then underwent three uncomfortable procedures to test their pain tolerance: one where pressure was applied to their fingers, and two where either heat and cold was applied to their skin. The researchers measured how long each child waited before moving away from the painful stimulus, then asked them to rate the intensity and “unpleasantness” of the sensation. [p 710]
In general, Lu’s team found, children who typically used positive thinking or distractions to deal with pain had less discomfort during the study procedures than their peers did. The opposite was true of children who typically dealt with pain by internalizing/catastrophizing or by seeking emotional support. [abs]
“Children’s ability to tolerate pain varies considerably,” Lu told Reuters Health. “How they cope with pain may play a significant role in how much they can tolerate pain, and how they feel about the pain.” [email]
Coping style, Lu explained, can affect people’s anticipation of pain, or their perception of whether the pain is under their conscious control, for example.
“If a child copes with pain by focusing on how much the pain hurts, this will likely intensify their pain perception and the unpleasant feelings associated with pain, which is what we found in our study,” Lu said.
All of this suggests that teaching children more-positive ways of coping might help them get through transient pain, according to the researchers. “We can help children go through medical procedures,” Lu said, “by teaching them to reassure themselves, ‘be strong,’ ‘everything will be ok,’ and ‘I can handle anything that happens’.”
SOURCE: Journal of Pain, September 2007.
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