Assessing the Efficacy of a Hope Intervention in Temporomandibular Disorder

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the contribution of positive psychological factors (e.g., optimism, pain acceptance, hope) to pain and pain-related coping. Although research supports the significance of these resilience factors in pain adaptation, psychological interventions based upon bolstering resilience have received far less attention. Emerging evidence supports the role of hope in psychosocial adjustment and enhancement of adaptive pain coping skills. Hope is considered to be a positive motivational state consisting of one's belief in their ability to generate routes to achieve goals (pathways) and initiation towards attaining these goals (agency). In the context of pain, increasing hope may promote augmentation of personal strengths to enhance development of meaningful goal pursuits and foster resilient outcomes. Enhancement of hopeful thinking and behavior may ultimately lead to the minimization of losses that are often associated with chronic pain. This experience may be also reflected physiologically, as increasing hope may confer biological benefits (e.g., decreased inflammation). Although hope-based interventions have been successfully applied in other clinical conditions (i.e., cancer), their utility in chronic pain disorders has not been examined.

To examine the effectiveness of this approach, a two-arm randomized trial will be conducted with individuals who have TMD. In Study Arm 1, participants will receive hope-based therapy. In Study Arm 2, participants will receive pain education. Participants will attend 5 sessions over a period of 5 weeks. Two of these sessions will involve quantitative sensory pain testing; three sessions will include delivery of the treatment intervention. Pain outcomes will be measured at pre- and post-treatment.

Aims:

1. Examine the degree to which state and trait levels of hope are predictive of clinical pain, disability, affective distress, and experimental pain.
2. Investigate the effects of a hope intervention, as compared to an education control group, on clinical and experimental pain in individuals with TMD.
3. Identify psychosocial (e.g., hope, optimism, positive affect, catastrophizing), biological (e.g., inflammatory, endogenous opioid, neuroendocrine), and psychophysical factors associated with positive treatment response (i.e., reduction of clinical pain).