Greater dispositional optimism is related to diminished temporal summation of heat pain in older adults with knee pain with and without radiographic evidence of knee osteoarthritis

Abstract

Existing evidence suggests that personality factors can influence individuals' responses to pain. Of interest, dispositional optimism has been related to diminished pain sensitivity and adaptive pain responses. One explanation for the beneficial contributions of dispositional optimism to the pain experience is that optimism is associated with endogenous pain processing mechanisms. Our group has previously shown that greater dispositional optimism was associated with enhanced endogenous pain-inhibitory processes,1 yet it remains to be tested whether dispositional optimism is also inversely related with pain facilitatory processes such as temporal summation (TS) of pain, a presumed perceptual manifestation of enhanced central excitability.