Papers of the Week

Cognitive-affective factors influence the perception of pain and disability. These factors can lead to pain behaviors (PB) that can persist and become maladaptive. These maladaptive PB will further increase the risk of chronicity or persistence of symptoms and disability. Thus, clinicians must be prepared to recognize maladaptive PB in a clinical context. To date, in the context of assessment in a rehabilitation setting, PB in clinical settings are poorly documented. The main objective of this study was to identify direct observation methods and critically appraise them in order to propose recommendations for practice. As a secondary objective, we explored and extracted the different observable PB that patients could exhibit and that clinicians could observe.