Patient Information Leaflet



Patient Information Leaflet

This leaflet is for patients who have attended an initial Clinical Psychology appointment in the pain service. The leaflet explains to you and your family what is involved in a psychology treatment based on a cognitive behavioural understanding of chronic pain and what you might expect as the outcome. This information is written to aid your decision about taking up a series of sessions with a Clinical Psychologist.

The prevalence of health behaviors varies across social groups. For example, in the Western World smoking is generally more prevalent among those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. This might suggest such sociodemographic factors as the focus of interventions to change health behaviors. However, such factors are frequently impossible to change or require political intervention at national or international levels (e.g., change in income distribution). This is one reason why a considerable body of research has focused on more modifiable factors assumed to mediate the relationship between socio-demographic factors and health-related behaviors [4].

Social Cognition Models

Social cognition models (SCMs) detail the important cognitions that distinguish between those performing and not performing behaviors. The focus is on the cognitions or thought processes that intervene between observable stimuli and behavior in real-world situations. This approach is founded on the assumption that behavior is best understood as a function of people's perceptions of reality, rather than objective characterizations of the stimulus environment [3].

SCMs can be seen as one part of self-regulation research. Self-regulation processes are defined as those “... mental and behavioral processes by which people enact their self-conceptions, revise their behavior, or alter the environment so as to bring about outcomes in it in line with their self-perceptions and personal goals”. Selfregulation research has emerged from a clinical tradition in psychology which views the individual as striving to eliminate dysfunctional patterns of thinking or behavior and engage in adaptive patterns of thinking or behavior.

The Health Belief Model

The Health Belief Model (HBM) is the oldest and most widely used SCM (see Abraham and Sheeran, 2005, for a recent review). In one of the earliest studies, Hochbaum (1958) reported that perceived susceptibility to tuberculosis and the belief that people with the disease could be asymptomatic (so that screening would be beneficial) distinguished between attendees and nonattendees for chest x-rays. Haefner and Kirscht (1970) extended this research by demonstrating that an intervention designed to increase participants' perceived susceptibility, perceived severity, and anticipated benefits resulted in a ...