Turkish UCLA PTSD-RI-5: Validation and the Role of Symptom Severity in Functional Impairment.

It is well established that biopsychosocial factors impact pain (Ashton‐James et al. ; Fillingim ; Gatchel et al. ; Nahman‐Averbuch et al. ), yet the role of social factors, particularly social support, has received less attention (Kapos et al. ). Evidence indicates bidirectional relationships between social factors and chronic pain, with greater social support from family and friends related to lower chronic pain severity and vice versa (Chan et al. ; Eccleston et al. ; Forgeron et al. ; Kashikar‐Zuck et al. ; Palermo et al. ; Ross et al. ; Wolock et al. ). In contrast, the effect of social support on experimental pain is less clear. One study in healthy adults found that larger social networks were related to greater experimental pain responses in women but lower responses in men (Vigil et al. ). However, little is known about the relationships between social factors, including social identity and social relationships, and experimental pain sensitivity in healthy adolescents, which could be critical to understanding changes in pain during adolescence. Adolescence is a critical period involving extensive developmental biopsychosocial changes, which include alterations in experimental pain sensitivity and in the development and reinforcement of self‐identity (Blankenburg et al. ; Hagy et al. ; Hirschfeld et al. ; Tsao et al. ). Self‐identity includes the social identity of peer and family relationships and differentiation and autonomy from parents occurring as adolescents transition to having more social support needs met by peers (Berenbaum et al. ; Guassi Moreira et al. ; Meeus et al. ; Pfeifer and Allen ). A relatively novel approach to measuring psychological, affective and social aspects of people's experiences is the Linguistic Inquiry Word Count (LIWC) (Tausczik and Pennebaker ). The advantage of this method is that it allows for quantifying qualitative data and provides individuals with a more natural way to express themselves, which could reveal important social aspects (Pennebaker et al. ). Using the LIWC method, recent studies found that adolescents with and without chronic pain had similar LIWC social scores (Nimbley et al. ). In adult patients with chronic pain, pain catastrophizing scores were related to social personal scores (Junghaenel et al. ), and patients with greater pain intensity had lower social scores for ‘friends’ compared to patients with low pain intensity (Camerota et al. ). A better understanding of the impact of social factors on individual differences in experimental pain sensitivity and modulation could provide a mechanistic explanation for their interrelationships with chronic pain. Moreover, it could advance the development of social‐based interventions to prevent or reduce chronic pain severity, especially during puberty. The present study aimed to examine the relationships between experimental pain sensitivity and social factors in healthy adolescent girls. We hypothesized that greater social scores, indicative of greater social support, would be related to lower experimental pain sensitivity. We focused on the social factors related to self‐identity and family and peer relationships, which represent different domains of social development (Jones et al. ).