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Temperament, Character, and Personality Disorders in Chronic Pain

  • Psychiatric Management of Pain (M Clark, Section Editor)
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Abstract

In the past decades investigators have used personality inventories to help explain the relationship between personality and pain experience. This article reviews empirical research, which has examined temperament and character features in chronic pain patients. Robert Cloninger’s temperament and character model of personality based on a bio-psychosocial approach to personality and psychopathology has been used in multiple studies investigating the temperament and character profile of chronic pain patients. According to Cloninger’s model, research portrayed a common personality profile of chronic pain patients characterized by prevailing harm avoidance and lower self-directedness, which has been shown to predict the presence of a personality disorder. Pain-prone patients could benefit from the measurement of personality by the temperament and character inventory with improved treatment response.

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  1. Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University of Bonn, Sigmund-Freud-Str. 25, 53105, Bonn, Germany

    Rupert Conrad, Ingo Wegener, Franziska Geiser & Alexandra Kleiman

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  1. Rupert Conrad
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  2. Ingo Wegener
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Correspondence to Rupert Conrad.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Psychiatric Management of Pain

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Conrad, R., Wegener, I., Geiser, F. et al. Temperament, Character, and Personality Disorders in Chronic Pain. Curr Pain Headache Rep 17, 318 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11916-012-0318-3

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