Positive/ Negative Affect, Strategies of Cognitive Emotion Regulation and Alexithymia in Female Patients with Migraine Headache

The most common headache, migraine, is a recurring and pulsing pain together with nausea, which may last for 4 to 72 hours. Since migraine has multiple biological, psychological, and environmental causes, it is considered a chronic disease by health psychologists. This comparative and investigative research aims to answer this essential question that whether positive and negative affections, cognitive emotion regulation strategies, and alexithymia as the psychological mechanisms are different in adolescent girls with and without migraine?

This research was a descriptive study of casual-comparative design. The sample consisted of two groups of girls with and without migraine, who were selected by convenience sampling and purposeful technique from therapeutic centers of Arak in 2017 (40 individuals per group). The participants completed Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20 (Bagbi, Parker, & Taylor, 1994), Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Garfenski, Kraaji, & Spin-hoven, 2002), and Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1998). T-test and multivariate analysis of variance were used to analyze the data.  

The results showed that girls with migraine scored significantly higher than the girls without migraine in alexithymia, negative affect, rumination and catastrophizing (p<0.05), but their scores on positive affect and refocus on planning was significantly lower than girls without migraine (p<0.05). There was no significant difference between the groups in terms of self-blaming and other-blaming, positive reappraisal, positive refocusing, perspective taking, and acceptance (P>0.05).

Based on the results of this study, it can be said that girls with and without migraine are significantly different in terms of psychological mechanisms; in such a way that girls with migraine use negative psychological mechanisms in their emotion regulation. These findings indicate that physicians and psychotherapist should pay essential attention to the special psychological attributes of girls with migraine at the time of prevention and treatment.