The Effectiveness Of Loving-Kindness Meditation On Patients With Chronic Pain

Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience caused by the actual or potential tissue damage or description of those damages. Acute pain is of great importance to human beings. However, chronic pain has lost its meaning of signal, only brought the pain and heavy negative psychological problems to patients, which also increased the comorbidity rate of chronic pain and psychological mood disorder.With the popularity of mindfulness in western psychology, Loving-Kindness Meditation has been receiving increasing attention from psychologists as an other traditional buddhist meditation with great potential for application. Systematic practice of Loving-Kindness Meditation can be used as a kind of emotion regulation strategies to cultivate positive emotions and remit negative emotional responses. It can also effectively improve one’s self-compassion, and foster empathy and positive attitude to others. Meanwhile, it can be helpful for the treatments of some diseases. In the domestic, however, the study of Loving-Kindness Meditation is still in its infancy, so that the research is almost in a blank state. Consequently, the purpose of this article is to investigate the psychological mechanism of chronic pain, and try to use Loving-Kindness Meditation practice as psychological intervention in the patients with chronic pain.This article choose30patients with chronic pain and30healthy people, and they should complete the battery of questionnaires, including Coping Style Questionnaire, Eysenck Personality Questionnaire and SCL-90, in order to fully understand the personality characteristics, cognitive characteristics, coping style and mental health of patients with chronic pain. Then with the two-group pretest-posttest design, the experimental group (N=10) accept Loving-Kindness Meditation intervention for six weeks,once a week,except the routine care, while the control group (N=10) only accept the routine care. So that we can discuss the improvement effects of Loving-Kindness Meditation on curing the degree of pain, mood and mental health.The results show that, Compared with healthy people, patients with chronic pain has its unique psychological characteristics, shown as:when facing the problem they are easy to self-condemned, fantasy and rationalizing; and they have more introversive personality and neuroticism; while with no obvious abnormality on mental symptoms, they get higher scores on somatization, obsession, depression, anxiety, terror, psychoticism, and the other projects. And after six times of Loving-Kindness Meditation training, the pain, emotional states and psychological health level of patients with chronic pain has been improved to a certain, which shows that Loving-Kindness Meditation has the auxiliary effects on the clinical treatment of patients with chronic pain and may be helpful to the effect of physical therapy.