ABSTRACT

Introduction: Healthy people often experience headache, cognitive failures, or mental fatigue. Some people even experience these symptoms on a level comparable to patients with mild spectrum brain injuries. In these individuals, the fear-avoidance model explains symptoms as a consequence of catastrophizing and fear-avoidance toward mental activities. This experimental study investigated in healthy adults whether fear-avoidance and catastrophizing about mental activities are related to fear-avoidance behavior (i.e., behavioral avoidance of mental activities) according to the fear-avoidance model.

Method: A randomized crossover within-subject design was used with two measurements and 80 participants. Participants were exposed to three demanding cognitive tasks and their simplified counterparts. Post-concussion symptoms, catastrophizing, fear-avoidance, behavioral avoidance (time spent working on cognitive tasks), exposure to mental activity, depression, heart rate, and state-trait anxiety were assessed.

Results: Significant correlations between the variables of the fear-avoidance model were found. Furthermore, catastrophizers spent less time on difficult tasks compared to easy tasks. Both catastrophizing and female sex predicted time spent on difficult tasks, whereas only female sex predicted time spent on easy tasks.

Conclusions: This study found that, according to the fear-avoidance model, catastrophizing is related to behavioral avoidance of cognitively challenging tasks in a community sample.

摘要

简介：健康的人经常会出现头痛，认知障碍或精神疲劳。某些人甚至出现的症状水平与轻度颅脑损伤患者的水平相当。在这些人中，回避恐惧模型解释了由于灾难性的回避和对心理活动的回避而产生的症状。这项实验研究在健康成年人中根据恐惧回避模型调查了避免恐惧和对精神活动的灾难性行为是否与避免恐惧行为（即，精神活动的行为避免）相关。

方法：采用随机交叉的受试者内部设计进行两次测量，共有80名参与者。参与者面临着三项艰巨的认知任务及其简化的任务。评估了脑震荡后的症状，灾难性，避免恐惧，避免行为（花费在认知任务上的时间），精神活动，抑郁，心率和状态焦虑。

结果：恐惧避免模型的变量之间存在显着的相关性。此外，与简单任务相比，灾难化者在困难任务上花费的时间更少。灾难性和女性都预测花费在困难任务上的时间，而只有女性预测要花费在简单任务上的时间。

结论：这项研究发现，根据避免恐惧模型，灾难性化与社区样本中对具有挑战性的认知任务的行为避免有关。