Year: 2011
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The present study examined the relationship between pain-related fear and avoidance behavior and the role that psychological variables, such as depression, play in the relationship between pain-related fear and cognitive performance in recurrent headache.The concept of cogniphobia (i.e., fear of cognitive exertion) was adapted from kinesiophobia (i.e., fear of physical movement) to describe the relationship between pain-related fear and cognitive performance in headache.Prior research testing the construct of cogniphobia has been extremely limited.In the current study, 70 individuals with two or more headaches per month were recruited from an undergraduate population.Assessment included measures of attention, memory, pain-related fear (including cogniphobia), effort, avoidance, pain, depression, anxiety, locus of control and self-efficacy.As expected, cogniphobia was significantly related to selfreported avoidance, psychological variables, other pain-related fear measures, pain catastrophizing, pain experience, and pain cognition variables such as self-efficacy and locus of control.Cogniphobia was related to poorer performance on an attention measure, but not after controlling for depression.While these findings suggest that cogniphobia mirrors kinesiophobia in many ways, findings from this study also suggest that cogniphobia may play a different or more nuanced role in relation to cognitive performance than kinesiophobia plays with physical performance.
Author: Brad A. Spickard
Institution: Ohio University
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Neurology
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2279254828