Daily Spousal Responsiveness Predicts Longer-Term Trajectories of Patients' Physical Function
PainSci summary of Wilson 2017?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided at the bottom of the page, as often as possible. ★★★☆☆?3-star ratings are for typical studies with no more (or less) than the usual common problems. Ratings are a highly subjective opinion, and subject to revision at any time. If you think this paper has been incorrectly rated, please let me know.
Empathy and sympathy matter. Please, wives and husbands, don’t roll your eyes at your spouse’s symptom reports! In this study of 145 people with knee osteoarthritis, patients whose spouses were more openly sympathetic did better compared to those whose spouses were “punishing” or merely “solicitous.”
original abstract†Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Everyday interpersonal experiences may underlie the well-established link between close relationships and physical health, but multiple-timescale designs necessary for strong conclusions about temporal sequence are rarely used. The current study of 145 patients with knee osteoarthritis and their spouses focused on a novel pattern in everyday interactions, daily spousal responsiveness-the degree to which spouses' responses are calibrated to changes in patients' everyday verbal expression of pain. Using couple-level slopes, multilevel latent-variable growth models tested associations between three types of daily spousal responsiveness (empathic, solicitous, and punishing responsiveness), as measured during a 3-week experience-sampling study, and change in patients' physical function across 18 months. As predicted, patients whose spouses were more empathically responsive to their pain expression showed better physical function over time compared with those whose spouses were less empathically responsive. This study points to daily responsiveness, a theoretically rooted operationalization of spousal sensitivity, as important for long-term changes in patients' objective physical function.
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One article on PainScience.com cites Wilson 2017 as a source:
- PS Pain Relief from Personal Growth — Treating tough pain problems with the pursuit of emotional intelligence, life balance, and peacefulness
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
- The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.
- Agreement of self-reported items and clinically assessed nerve root involvement (or sciatica) in a primary care setting. Konstantinou 2012 Eur Spine J.
- Effect of NSAIDs on Recovery From Acute Skeletal Muscle Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Morelli 2017 Am J Sports Med.
- Association of Spinal Manipulative Therapy With Clinical Benefit and Harm for Acute Low Back Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Paige 2017 JAMA.