Feeling Trapped and Optimistic: Current Rather than Prospective Medical Conditions Dominate Self-Reported Emotions and Appraisals in Mechanically Ventilated Spinal Cord Injury Patients.

Abstract

Adverse medical conditions can involve present and expected future restrictions as a double burden: mechanically ventilated patients with spinal cord injury (SCI), on the one hand, face pain and communication restrictions. On the other hand, they are confronted with significant changes in their future life perspective. While past research on emotion and appraisals has studied SCI patients alone or in comparison with healthy controls, the current work disentangles the potential impact of (a) the adverse current state and (b) expected future restrictions by comparing mechanically ventilated intensive care unit (ICU) patients with vs. without SCI in eye-tracking-based self-reports on emotions and appraisals. Results suggest that patients of either group could provide faceted accounts of their current state, such as feeling trapped and insecure. However, the feedback that SCI and other ICU patients gave was similar, suggesting that current adversities dominate self-reports.