Perceived injustice and its relation to chronic pain outcome in complex regional pain syndrome and chronic musculoskeletal pain

ObjectivesClinical observations indicate that patients with complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) tend to ruminate about their illness. Perceived injustice is a negative cognitive-emotional appraisal regarding the severity of loss associated with blame, unfairness, and pain. We investigated injustice beliefs in CRPS compared with chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMP), where previous evidence indicates clinical relevance for pain-related outcome in this patients’ group. The role of perceived injustice in relation to pain intensity and disability was tested through a mediation model including catastrophizing thoughts of pain.MethodsPatients with CRPS (mean age M = 50.9, SD = 13.8) and CMP (mean age M = 53.9, SD = 8.0 years) were enrolled at two independent specialized outpatient clinics. All patients completed questionnaires on pain intensity, pain disability, and perceived injustice, levels of depression and pain catastrophizing.ResultsCRPS patients displayed higher levels of perceived injustice than the CPM patients. Higher pain intensity in both cohorts was indirectly associated with more feelings and beliefs of injustice through a higher tendency to catastrophize about pain and pain-related information. In contrast, only in the CMP group higher pain-related disability was related to higher catastrophizing, which mediated the effect of perceived injustice.ConclusionsPerceived injustice influences especially pain intensity through pain catastrophizing. This interaction appears to be common for both pain syndromes

Enter Mercury, Sleeping: Delivering Prayers on the Early Modern Stage

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from CUP via the DOI in this recor

Billy’s Fist

Matthew Rebhorn, “Billy’s Fist: Neuroscience and Corporeal Reading in Melville’s Billy Budd” (pp. 218–244) This essay explores the relationship between Herman Melville’s Billy Budd (published 1924) and late-nineteenth-century neuroscience—particularly works by Alexander Bain and George Henry Lewes—to argue that this novel advances a new way of reading the body. Inflected by Melville’s late encounter with Arthur Schopenhauer’s ruminations on “will power,” Melville uses neuroscience to develop Schopenhauer’s idea into what I am calling a “corporeal reading” practice. This is a reading practice, I argue, that erodes the ontological distinction between the mind and body, between the mind as subject and the body as mere object. Yet because Melville set this novel in wartime, this new reading practice also reveals the deep, and often deadly, tensions that accompany understanding the body as having a mind of its own. In this way, Billy Budd becomes a primer not only for expanding the notion of the bodily consciousness, but also for learning to read the political inflections of the animate body and its “will (to) power.”</jats:p