Emotions matter: The role of emotional approach coping in chronic pain.

BACKGROUND: Emotional approach coping (EAC) is a potentially adaptive emotion-focused coping style that involves understanding or processing one's emotions and expressing them appropriately. Although EAC has been studied in various populations, little is known about this construct among people with chronic pain, including potential mediators such as negative affect, which might link EAC to pain-related variables, and moderators of these relationships. METHODS: Participants (N = 670; 76% women; 30% older adults-age 60 or over) with chronic pain completed online the Emotional Approach Coping Scale and measures of pain severity, pain interference and negative affect. Analyses correlated EAC to pain severity and interference and tested whether gender and age group (older adults versus young/middle-age adults) moderated the mediated relationships of EAC with pain-related variables through negative affect. RESULTS: Findings reveal that higher EAC was associated with lower pain intensity through lower negative affect in the young/middle-age portion of the sample, but not older adults. Also, higher EAC was associated with lower pain interference through lower negative affect among women in the sample, but not men. The associations of EAC to pain intensity and interference are small in magnitude, however, and should be considered preliminary. CONCLUSION: EAC is associated with lower pain intensity in young/middle-age adults and lower pain interference in women, and lower negative affect mediates these relationships. These results suggest the potential value of assessing and bolstering emotional approach coping processes in some people with chronic pain.

An Examination of the Relationship between Lipid Levels and Associated Genetic Markers across Racial/Ethnic Populations in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis.

Large genome-wide association studies have reported hundreds of genetic markers associated with lipid levels. However, the discovery and estimated effect of variants at these loci, derived from samples of exclusively European descent, may not generalize to the majority of the world populations. We examined the collective strength of association among these loci in a diverse set of U.S. populations from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis. We constructed a genetic risk score for each lipid outcome based on previously identified lipid-associated genetic markers, and examined the relationship between the genetic risk scores and corresponding outcomes. We discover this relationship was often moderated by race/ethnicity. Our findings provide insight into the generalizability and predictive utility of large sample size meta-analyses results when leveraging data from a single population. We hope these findings will encourage researchers to investigate genetic susceptibility in more diverse populations and explore the source of such discrepancies. Until then, we caution clinicians, genetic counselors, and genetic testing consumers when interpreting genetic data on complex traits.