Children in pain: an investigation of selective memory for pain and psychological adjustment

This study investigated the effects of chronic pain on processing and recall of pain-related and neutral information in a group of children suffering from chronic pain due to juvenile arthritis, and a control group. Children were asked to encode pain-sensory, pain-affective and neutral words in a self and another person reference condition. Percentage recall and processing time for each wordtype were used as dependent measures. It was predicted that the pain group would present enhanced recall and faster processing times for pain related information encoded in self-reference when compared to the control group. The results showed that for the recall scores the pain group recalled significantly more sensory and neutral words in the self-reference condition than the control group, which showed the opposite recall pattern. The analysis of the processing times revealed that the pain group allocated less time to the processing of sensory and neutral information in the self-reference condition, whilst again the control group showed the opposite pattern. Selective memory for sensory information encoded in the self-reference condition for the chronic pain group provides preliminary evidence for a pain-specific memory bias in children and replicates the effects observed in studies with adult chronic pain groups. A similar bias was found for neutral words, but this might be due to an experimental artefact. Facilitated processing for sensory information encoded in self-reference was observed only for the pain group. This suggests that children in pain exhibit specific patterns of cognitive processing of pain information whilst they present normal depression and anxiety levels.