ose who suffer from migraine headaches to suppress their emotion? Unfortunately, there has been very little current or earlier literature which has examined this specific aspect of the personalities of migraine sufferers. Therefore, in order to get a full understanding of whether emotional suppression is a factor in migraine, it is necessary to first review the few empirical studies of migraine and emotional suppression that do exist and then examine the general literature on migraine and personality in order to determine whether it contains implications about emotional suppression. The examination of these two areas of the literature is presented below.
One of the few direct studies of the suppression of emotions hypothesis was conducted by Gerhards (1992) who studied verbal expressions of anger and anxiety in patients with migraine headaches to test clinical observations indicating that migraine patients are inhibited in their expression of anger and to determine whether this inhibition is specific for anger or indicative of a more general inhibition of emotional expressiveness. Subjects in the study were 30 West German adults inpatients (mean age 42 years) and 30 normal West German adults (mean age 39 yrs) with no history of chronic or acute illnesses or disabilities.
Subjects were asked to describe their emotional reactions and behaviors with regard to two anger-inducing and two anxiety-inducing scenarios and to rate their levels of stress experienced in each situation. Intergroup differences in the quantity of verbal expressions of anger and anxiety and in reported stress levels were analyzed. Results were said to support the notion that there was greater inhibition of emotion in the migraine headache group.
In another study of direct relevance to whether migraine headache sufferers inhibit their emotion, Brandt, Celentanto, Steward and Linet (1990) investigated whether individuals who suffer from chronic, severe head...