Department of Psychology
(Indefinite) Pain in Children and Youth
A big part of pupils in Germany already have experiences with medical unclear/ psychogenic pain. The biggest group of infantile pain are headache like tension headache and migraine and unclear stomachache with a probability of occurrence of 15 - 20%. Around 3% of all children suffer from chronic pain and ca. 1.7% fulfil the diagnostically criteria for pain disorders. Regular pain is not only unpleasant for those affected, it also causes a series of adverse effects for the children and their families. It is not rarely, that children do not go to school repeatedly and/or can't do their favorite free time activities. Additionally, the parental worry about the afflictions reasons and consequences, connected with numerous doctor's visits ('doctor shopping') are a time, emotion and financial burden.
Explanatory Model for Development of Recurrent Psychogenic Pain
A biopsychosocial model explains the development and maintenance of pain. This includes hereditary factors, environmental factors, characteristics of the child and terms which include the family.
Most of all, stressors in the child's regular environment (school, family, friends) and children and parental dysfunctional reactions and coping strategies are upholding conditions for recurring pain.
Child pain diagnostic
To recognize and to determine the pain exactly is often not easy. The reason for this is, that younger children can´t describe the pain location so well, how the pain feels like and how intensive it is. Moreover, mostly they have only implicit ideas of coexisting symptoms or pandering factors, so the application of classic, written questionnaires is partially difficult.
To solve this problem, we developed the Child Pain Comic (CPC) for children older than 5 years. This questionnaire supports the information transfer through child-orientated pictures.
To get more information, there is also a comic version for the parents so that it is possible to compare both information with each other.
The first child and parental group has already tested the child pain comic and evaluated the handling as good to very good. In the next step, the child pain comic shell be compared (validated) with another diagnostic instrument, to prove that it offers a reliable way to gather infantile pain.
If you're interested to take part in the survey with your child or even with a whole primary school class or with the older part of a kindergarten group, just write an email with your contact details to: