Heartache and Backache- An Online Intervention Addressing Emotional and Physical Pain

This study is designed to determine if a brief educational program and a written emotional disclosure task can improve chronic back/neck pain-related outcomes and change pain beliefs and other processes in individuals with chronic back pain. Individuals will be randomly assigned to an experimental condition (pain and affect neuroscience education) or a control condition (general health activities questionnaire), and then subsequently randomized to a second experimental condition (written emotional disclosure) or a control condition (writing about healthy habits). Analyses will examine the main and interactive effects of the pain and affect neuroscience education and written emotional disclosure on improved pain-related outcomes at 1-month follow-up. Participants in both the experimental conditions are expected to show more improvement on pain severity, pain interference, psychological distress and psychological attitudes toward pain at follow-up, relative to participants in the control groups.