Open AccessIs Chronic Pain Temporal Pattern Associated with Middle-Aged and Older Adults’ Perceptions of their Futures?
Author(s) -
Gillian Fennell,
Abby Pui Wang Yip,
M. Carrington Reid,
Susan Enguídanos,
Elizabeth M. Zelinski,
Corinna E. Löckenhoff
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
health psychology bulletin
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2398-5941
DOI - 10.5334/hpb.34
Subject(s) - expansive , chronic pain , duration (music) , psychology , association (psychology) , perception , physical therapy , medicine , physical medicine and rehabilitation , audiology , neuroscience , art , materials science , compressive strength , literature , composite material , psychotherapist
A psychological consequence of chronic pain may be an inappropriately limited future time perspective (FTP) for middle-aged and older adults. FTP is defined as one's perception of time as limited or expansive. Potentially meaningful measures, like pain temporal pattern, are often ignored in the chronic pain literature. The present study uses secondary data to assess the association between pain temporal pattern and FTP, and the moderating effect of pain duration. Among 140 individuals with chronic pain, there was no significant association between pain pattern and FTP. However, both pain-related activity interference and pain duration were associated with FTP where greater interference predicted more limited FTP ( b = -0.16, p = .03) and longer pain duration contributed to more expansive FTP ( b = 0.001, p = .03). The temporal pattern x pain duration interaction terms were non-significant. We discuss implications, limitations, and future directions of these findings.