A systematic review of the biopsychosocial dimensions affected by chronic pain in children and adolescents: identifying reliable and valid pediatric multidimensional chronic pain assessment tools.

Pediatric chronic pain is a complex experience that is often challenging to describe and measure. Multidimensional tools that evaluate the biopsychosocial impact of chronic pain in pediatric patients can help clinicians to prioritize and tailor interdisciplinary pain care; yet, the psychometric value and clinical utility of such tools has not yet been systematically studied in the literature. The purpose of this review was to identify multidimensional biopsychosocial tools used in pediatric chronic pain, synthesize their reliability and validity evidence, and draw on this evidence to describe the relationships between chronic pain and biopsychosocial domains. The search involved 2 phases to (1) identify eligible tools and (2) conduct a measured forward citation search of tool development articles. Tool eligibility was guided by the Multidimensional Biobehavioral Model of Pediatric Pain and study eligibility was focused on primary chronic pain diagnoses unrelated to disease. Data extraction was focused on reliability and validity evidence of eligible tools, guided by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Results yielded 6 tools that included 64 eligible studies, highlighting 84 significant relationships between pain and functional interference across 11 biopsychosocial variables. All tools were shown to have good internal consistency and evidence of validity, primarily through relationships to other variables. Of the 6 tools, the most brief and easy to use were the most under studied. Further psychometric research is warranted for these tools to investigate their clinical utility and psychometric properties in guiding and prioritizing pain care for children and adolescents.

Detecting Foreign Accents in Song.

This paper presents three experiments exploring the perception and production of accents in song. In a perception experiment, participants listened to passages sung and spoken by native and non-native speakers of English. The participants did better at identifying native speakers when listening to the spoken passages. Accents were also judged as more native-like in song than in speech. In addition, two production experiments compared the acoustic characteristics (pitch, duration, F1 and F2) of sung and spoken vowels, produced by native and non-native speakers of English. Both native and non-native speakers changed the pitch and duration of their vowels when singing; the vowel quality was not consistently shifted. Together, the results indicate that the melody imposed by the song impacts the suprasegmental properties of pronunciation whereas the segmental properties remain largely intact. Based on these results, we conclude that a main reason why accents are more difficult to detect in song than in speech is that the rhythm and melody imposed by the song mask intonational cues to accent.