The aim of this pilot study was to explore the effects of an early and customized CBT intervention, mainly delivered via internet, for adolescents with coexisting recurrent pain and emotional distress (low mood, worry, and/or distress).
We hypothesized that certain symptoms associated with cognitive control abnormalities for emotion processing, such as sad mood, anxious mood, worry, and rumination/dwelling, would be responsive to the EFMT intervention, whereas other unrelated symptoms, such as sleep and appetite disturbance, would not.
Problem Areas in Diabetes is a 20-item measure of diabetes-related emotional distress that assesses a broad range of feelings related to living with diabetes and its treatment, including guilt, anger, frustration, depressed mood, worry, and fear.
The following tasks/scans were presented in consecutive order: emotional face-matching task (Hariri et al., 2002), mood (worry) induction paradigm (Paulesu et al., 2010), anatomical scan, resting state, interoceptive sensitivity task (Pollatos, Herbert, Matthias, & Schandry, 2007) and Ultimatum Game (Sanfey et al., 2003).
Problem Areas In Diabetes (15, 16): a 20-item scale that rates diabetes-related distress, including feelings related to living with diabetes and its treatment such as guilt, anger, frustration, depressed mood, worry, and fear, on a 5-point Likert scale.
It might also involve CBT for other difficulties, eg low mood or worry, rather than just for the psychotic symptoms themselves.
More generally, people experiencing low mood and worry vary in the extent to which they consider these emotions pathological or normal [ 11, 12].
Patients with MUS interpret low mood and worry in ways which permit them to be discussed with their doctor but which negate psychosomatic causality.
Instead, our findings suggest that keeping low mood or worry as personal responses to adversity, or as traits, avoids the difficulties of attributing physical symptoms to a mental disorder, for both patient and doctor.
Patients with MUS who are high users of secondary care services interpret low mood and worry in ways which allow them to be discussed with professionals, but not as the cause of their physical symptoms.
In keeping with the questionnaire responses, most patients described the experience of pervasive low mood or worry at some stage in their life; however they varied in describing these as 'feelings' or 'disorders' or both.
