[Coping with pain]. / Schmerzbewältigung.

Chronic pain is to be understood as a complex syndrome influenced by its intensity, character, localisation and time aspects as well as the subjective feeling of impairment and the accompanying emotions and cognitions. Based on the biopsychosocial concept of pain, therapies have to be multimodal to take into account the various dimensions of pain. One element of multimodal pain therapy is pain coping skills training, aimed at giving pain patients increasingly greater control over their pain by following the didactic guideline of small steps at a time. In addition to giving them disease-specific information, patients are supposed to learn to recognize dysfunctional components of their pain disorder and to alter them. Improved health and increased joy of living as well as a decrease of stressor-related activation (pain being the stressor) are the objectives of the training. Coping with pain as a programme aims at helping patients to help themselves. Pain coping skills training is indicated for patients already suffering from chronic pain or running a risk of pain chronicity.

A refined method to relate morphological and functional aspects of aphasia.

A method is described to relate brain morphology and neuropsychological disturbances such as aphasia. By mapping lesions with computerized tomography onto a grid model of five brain slices, it is possible to compare aphasiological information and lesion site by data processing, allowing the quantitative and qualitative manipulation of a large number of data. The soundness of the method is investigated in a pilot study on the localization of aphasic disturbances. Data processing was performed on a preliminary group of 70 patients with different aphasic syndromes (Broca, Wernicke, and global aphasics with and without recurring utterances). The results confirmed the findings of older studies, with the typical locus of Wernicke's aphasia being Wernicke's area. In conformity to more recent studies, the main lesion for Broca aphasics was found to be in the insular cortex, with a relatively important participation of the frontal white matter. The implications of this refined method for more vigorous aphasiological and neuropsychological research are briefly indicated.