The social aspects studied were parents of disabled children and spouses of individuals with chronic pain. With minimal modification, to address the subject of the catastrophizing, the PCS can also be applied to pain catastrophizing in a social context. Further, more controlled studies are urgently needed to tease apart these issues of cause and effect. If female participants have, on average, experienced more intense and/or persistent pain in their past than male participants, this could also explain their higher endorsement of items relating to pain catastrophizing. However, it is important to remember that these studies ask participants to report on pain experiences from their past the overall level of pain experienced is not controlled across genders. The gender focused study expressed that female subjects report more frequent experiences of pain, varied intensity with increased persistence, and lower pain tolerances and thresholds. Several such studies have shown the PCS to be invariant, with most accuracy in the three oblique factor structure, across genders and both clinical and non-clinical groups.
Participants are asked about pain experiences in their past they then rate how well various statements fit their thoughts and feelings at the time. Studies of the PCS have generally used a self-report design. Other self-report measurement tools such as: the Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ), the Pain-Related Self-Statements Scale (PRSS) and the Cognitive Coping Strategy Inventory (CCS) had subscales for assessing catastrophizing but failed to explore specific dimensions of catastrophizing. (Note: For the listed items above, (R) Rumination, (M) Magnification, and (H) Helplessness.)īefore the development of the PCS there had been no other self-report measurement tool that focused primarily on catastrophizing.
One suggestion is that catastrophizing influences pain perception through altering attention and anticipation, and heightening emotional responses to pain. It is generally assumed that the tendency to catastrophize plays a causal role in the pain experience – that is, it causes the person to experience the pain as more intense. People who report a large number of such thoughts during a pain experience are more likely to rate the pain as more intense than those who report fewer such thoughts. Pain catastrophizing is the tendency to describe a pain experience in more exaggerated terms than the average person, to ruminate on it more (e.g., "I kept thinking 'this is terrible'"), and/or to feel more helpless about the experience ("I thought it was never going to get better").