Kopera M, et al. – The authors examined the relationships between components of emotional intelligence and self–reported pain severity in alcohol dependence (AD) patients. The current findings extended previous results showing that emotion regulation deficits were associated with self–reported pain in AD subjects. In the treatment of AD patients with comorbid pain symptoms, comprehensive strategies focusing on the improvement of mood regulation skills could be effective.

• The authors recruited a sample of 103 participants from an alcohol treatment center in Warsaw, Poland.
• They obtained information concerning pain level in the last 4 weeks, demographics, the severity of current anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as neuroticism.
• They divided the study sample into “mild or no pain” and “moderate or greater pain” groups.

• Across a set of sociodemographic, psychological, and clinical factors, higher emotion regulation and higher education predicted lower severity, while increased levels of anxiety predicted the higher severity of self-reported pain during the previous 4 weeks in the logistic regression model.
• Emotion regulation appeared to fully mediate the relationship between depression severity and pain, and partially the relationship between anxiety severity and pain when the mediation models looking at the association between current severity of anxiety and depressive symptoms and pain severity with the mediating role of emotion regulation were tested.