Abstract
Article presents selected psychological, neurophysiological and clinical problems of chronic pain (CP) and discusses open questions of psychology of CP, related with clinical practice. Changes of primary acute pain into consecutive affective-motivation and behavioral processes, pain behavior, as well as increasing independence of cognitions, affects and behaviors on tissue damage during developement of CP are discussed.
Jerome's (1993) Information Processing Theory of Chronic Human Pain is assessed as inspirational but untestable. The flow chart of a new model of mechanism of CP is presented (Figure 1).
This model involves 7 concecutive subsystems: hypothetical perceptual field and 6 subsystems confirmed by factor analysis: nociceptive processes, pain feeling, cognitive processing, affective-motivation processes, responses and behavior, and responses and behavior of others (Knotek et al., 1997a). The stages of pain processing (Wade et al., 1996), problems of affective or affective-cognitive nature of suffering, affects started by pain feeling and by cognitive processing of pain event (post-cognitive affects) are discussed.