Alert to Hurt: Threat Appraisal Mediates the Association Between Attachment Anxiety and Perceptions of Pain Burden Among Healthy Young Adults.

The experience of pain can vary considerably from one person to the next. Consequently, research has begun to explore the factors that may predict this inter-individual variability, including individual differences in attachment anxiety. Attachment anxiety has been linked convincingly to sensitivity to pain and susceptibility to chronic pain disorders. Still, the leading model relevant to the relationship between attachment anxiety and pain is highly complex and may not generalize to populations that do not, specifically, suffer from chronic pain. In the current study, we build off this past literature and theorized that threat appraisal and alexithymia, which are each closely related to attachment anxiety, will explain the relationship between attachment anxiety and perceived pain burden among healthy young adults. Results partially supported our primary mediation hypotheses, such that both threat appraisal and alexithymia each exhibited a significant indirect effect underlying the association between attachment anxiety and perceived pain burden. However, only threat appraisal yielded a significant indirect effect in a parallel mediation model. Our mediation findings provide encouraging insights into the relationship between attachment anxiety and the pain experience.