Dolor, emociones y locus coeruleus Translated title: Pain, emotions and locus coeruleus

The current International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) definition of pain as "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage" was recommended by the Subcommittee on Taxonomy and adopted by the IASP Council in 1979. This definition has become accepted widely by health care professionals and researchers in the pain field and adopted by several professional, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations, including the World Health Organization. In recent years, some in the field have reasoned that advances in our understanding of pain warrant a reevaluation of the definition and have proposed modifications. Therefore, in 2018, the IASP formed a 14-member, multinational Presidential Task Force comprising individuals with broad expertise in clinical and basic science related to pain, to evaluate the current definition and accompanying note and recommend whether they should be retained or changed. This review provides a synopsis of the critical concepts, the analysis of comments from the IASP membership and public, and the committee's final recommendations for revisions to the definition and notes, which were discussed over a 2-year period. The task force ultimately recommended that the definition of pain be revised to "An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage," and that the accompanying notes be updated to a bulleted list that included the etymology. The revised definition and notes were unanimously accepted by the IASP Council early this year.

Research on emotion and pain has burgeoned. We review the last decade's literature, focusing on links between emotional processes and persistent pain. Neurobiological research documents the neural processes that distinguish affective from sensory pain dimensions, link emotion and pain, and generate central nervous system pain sensitization. Psychological research demonstrates that greater pain is related to emotional stress and limited emotional awareness, expression, and processing. Social research shows the potential importance of emotional communication, empathy, attachment, and rejection. Emotions are integral to the conceptualization, assessment, and treatment of persistent pain. Research should clarify when to eliminate or attenuate negative emotions, and when to access, experience, and express them. Theory and practice should integrate emotion into cognitive-behavioral models of persistent pain. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Emotion regulation (ER) refers to attempts to influence emotions in ourselves or others. Over the past several decades, ER has become a popular topic across many subdisciplines within psychology. One framework that has helped to organize work on ER is the process model of ER, which distinguishes 5 families of strategies defined by when they impact the emotion generation process. The process model embeds these ER strategies in stages in which a need for regulation is identified, a strategy is selected and implemented, and monitoring occurs to track success. Much of the research to date has focused on a strategy called cognitive reappraisal, which involves changing how one thinks about a situation to influence one's emotional response. Reappraisal is thought to be generally effective and adaptive, but there are important qualifications. In this article, we use reappraisal as an example to illustrate how we might consider 4 interrelated issues: (a) the consequences of using ER, either when instructed or spontaneous; (b) how ER success and frequency are shaped by individual and environmental determinants; (c) the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that make ER possible; and (d) interventions that might improve how well and how often people use ER. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).