Differences in psychosocial responses to pain between sufficiently and insufficiently active adults with arthritis

Abstract

Objective: Adults with arthritis struggle to meet the physical activity recommendation for disease self-management. Identifying psychosocial factors that differentiate adults who meet (sufficiently active) or do not meet (insufficiently active) the recommendation is needed. This study sought to examine differences in psychosocial responses to arthritis pain among adults who were sufficiently or insufficiently active.

Design: This prospective study included adults with medically diagnosed arthritis (N = 136, M_age = 49.75 ± 13.88 years) who completed two online surveys: (1) baseline: pain and psychosocial responses to pain and (2) two weeks later: physical activity.

Main outcome measures: Psychosocial responses examined in this study were psychological flexibility in response to pain, pain anxiety and maladaptive responses to pain anxiety.

Results: A between-groups MANCOVA comparing sufficiently active (n = 87) to insufficiently active (n = 49) participants on psychosocial responses, after controlling for pain intensity, was significant (p = .005). Follow-up ANOVA’s revealed that sufficiently active participants reported significantly higher psychological flexibility and used maladaptive responses less often compared to insufficiently active participants (p’s < .05).

Conclusions: These findings provide preliminary insight into the psychosocial profile of adults at risk for nonadherence due to their responses to arthritis pain.

Keywords:

• physical activity
• arthritis
• psychological flexibility
• maladaptive responses
• pain anxiety