From psychological to physical pain

People who engage in non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) for the purpose of reducing psychological pain offer a unique population to study how psychological pain interacts with physical pain. I examined the overlap between psychological and physical pain using an evolutionary framework to understand how cognitive resources may be shared in these sensations. The goal of this dissertation was to investigate the contribution of specific information processing deficits to the etiology of NSSI. In three experiments, the performance of a group of young adults who endorsed being in psychological pain and engaging in NSSI ( N = 37) was compared to a group of young adults who endorsed being in psychological pain but never engaging in NSSI ( N = 38). Experiment 1 evaluated selective attention for psychological and physical pain among self-injurers using a dot probe task. The results showed self-injurers' attentional bias towards psychological pain words was stronger than towards physical threat words, while the comparison group had a stronger bias towards physical threat. This suggests that self-injurers feel more threatened by psychological pain stimuli than those in the comparison group. Experiment 2 tested executive functioning deficits in the generation of language amongst self-injurers to better understand barriers to affect labeling, a coping strategy associated with decreases in psychological pain. The results revealed self-injurers' deficits on verbal, but not nonverbal, fluency tasks. Importantly, the difference in verbal fluency scores between groups increased following a negative mood induction, suggesting amplification of self-injurers' fluency deficits in negative mood states. Experiment 3 assessed the relative effectiveness of a verbal coping strategy versus the application of pain in relieving induced distress. Completion of the verbal task resulted in no group differences in reducing distress. Self it-timers reported a larger decrease in negative affect following the pain coping task, and a greater increase in positive affect, relative to the comparison group. These findings provide a foundation for future neurocognitive research aimed at identifying and understanding information processing deficits that link physical and psychological pain in NSSI. Ultimately, this line of research may improve the assessment and treatment of self-injury.