The Role of Perfectionistic Self-Presentation in Pediatric Pain.

Anupa Pathak,Elisabet Sánchez-Rodríguez,Ester Solé,Jordi Miró,Saurab Sharma,Alexandra Ferreira-Valente,Mark P. Jensen

doi:10.3390/ijerph18020591

Abstract

This study sought to better understand the associations between perfectionistic self-presentation and measures of pain intensity, pain catastrophizing, pain interference, and fatigue in children and adolescents with pain. In the study, 218 adolescents responded to measures of perfectionistic self-presentation (i.e., perfectionistic self-promotion, nondisplay of imperfection and nondisclosure of imperfection), pain intensity, pain catastrophizing, pain interference, and fatigue. Four hierarchical regression analyses and three mediation analyses were conducted. Our results showed that perfectionistic self-promotion was significantly and independently associated with pain intensity and that nondisplay of imperfection was significantly and independently associated with pain catastrophizing, pain interference, and fatigue. Nondisclosure of imperfection was not significantly associated with any criterion variable. Pain catastrophizing mediated the association between both perfectionistic self-presentation and nondisplay imperfection and pain interference but not between nondisclosure of imperfection and pain interference. The findings provide new information about the role of perfectionistic self-presentation in children and adolescents’ experience of pain. These findings, if replicated, support perfectionism as a potential target of pain treatment in young people.

Highlights

The primary objective of this study was to better understand the role that perfectionistic self-presentation plays in explaining the pain experience of children and adolescents with pain recruited from the community
We hypothesized that the three domains of perfectionistic self-presentation would evidence significant concurrent positive associations with measures of pain intensity, pain catastrophizing, pain interference, and fatigue in this sample
We sought to determine if the mediating effect of pain catastrophizing on the association between perfectionistic self-presentation and pain interference found in prior research would be replicated

Summary

Introduction

Between 11% and 38% of children and adolescents worldwide have been reported to experience some form of chronic pain [1], and about. 5% experience serious disability problems related to this pain [2]. In Spain, the prevalence of pediatric chronic pain is in line with these results. Found that 37% of schoolchildren reported some form of chronic pain. The biopsychosocial model of pain argues that a complex set of biological, psychological, and sociocultural variables contribute to the experience and impact of pain [3]. A psychological variable that is receiving a growing amount of empirical attention in the study of pediatric pain is perfectionism [4,5]. The first is trait perfectionism, defined as “ .

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