Volitional Action Control and Depression in Chronic Pain: Does Action versus State Orientation Moderate the Relations of Pain-Related Cognitions to Depression?

The rationale of this study was to better understand the interplay between content- and function-focused variables that are assumed to contribute to depression due to motivational and volitional deficits. Therefore, we stepwise examined the conditional indirect and direct relations of pain-related cognitions to depression. Subjective helplessness was included as presumably mediating the relations of catastrophizing and thought suppression to depression due to motivational deficits. In addition, moderating effects of dispositional action versus state orientation were analyzed, whereby state orientation indicates volitional deficits in coping with distress.

The data acquisition for this project was funded by the German Pension Insurance (Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the research priority “Chronic diseases and patient orientation” - Grant number: 0421-FSCP-0529.