The Mediating Role of Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience in the Relationship of Pain Self-Efficacy, Pain Management Strategies, and Resilience with Pain Perception in Chronic Pain Patients

 Personality variables play an important and pivotal role in the multifaceted biopsychosocial model of chronic pain. The present study was performed with the aim to examine the mediating role of conscientiousness and openness to experience in the relationship of pain self-efficacy, pain management strategies, and resilience with pain perception in chronic pain patients.

 The research method used was correlational and the statistical population included all 2141 patients suffering from chronic pain referred to medical centers in Tehran, Iran, in 2018-2019. Using Cochran’s formula and convenience sampling method 410 patients were selected as the study participants. Data were obtained using the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1992), Pain Self-Efficacy Questionnaire (Nicholas, 1989), Coping Strategies Questionnaire (CSQ) (Rosenstiel & Keefe, 1983), Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale (Connor & Davidson, 2003), and the West Haven-Yale Multidimensional Pain Inventory (Kerns, Turk, & Rudy, 1985). The collected data were analyzed using structural equations with partial least squares method in SPSS and Amos software.

 The findings of the present study showed that conscientiousness had no mediating role in the relationship between predictor variables of self-efficacy, pain management, and resilience and the criterion variable of pain perception, but openness to experience had a mediating role in the relationship between the above predictor and criterion variables (P < 0.001).

 It can be concluded that conscientiousness loses its mediating role in the presence of the variable of openness to experience, and clinically, the variable of openness to experience is effective on pain management.