Key aspects concerning the role of emotion in the chronic pain experience

Abstract

Pain and emotions are inherently connected, and this review presents contemporary findings on the pain-emotion connection. We address in what ways pain and emotions are related as well as how the link may be understood and targeted in treatment. Both pain and negative emotions are essential (and ancient) biological and motivational systems which share protective and regulatory functions. There is a marked co-occurrence between chronic pain and mental health conditions. One way to understand the pain-emotion connection, stressed by recent theoretical models, is that pain and emotions share cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that serve to downregulate these unpleasant inner states. Treatments targeting these shared regulatory mechanisms show promising results, but more research is needed on generalization, implementation and dissemination.