Interventions
pain
EVENTS, CHRONIC PAIN
The manualized MORE intervention program provided training in mindfulness, reappraisal, and savoring skills as techniques to cope with opioid craving, pain, and negative affect. Group sessions were 2 h long and led by a psychologist. Sessions included training in mindful breathing and body scan techniques to help patients self-regulate pain and opioid craving, reappraisal training to decrease negative emotions, and savoring training to amplify natural reward processing. With respect to savoring, specifically, participants were trained to mindfully focus attention on the sensory features of a pleasant object presented in the session (e.g. a rose), and then to appreciate and enjoy any positive emotions or pleasurable body sensations arising during the encounter with the pleasant stimulus. Then, participants were asked to engage in daily 15 min home practice of mindfulness as well as practicing savoring with naturally-occurring pleasant objects and events in everyday life.To control for non-specific factors including attention by a caring professional, therapeutic expectancy, and social support, we employed a manualized active SG control in this study. The SG consisted of 8 weekly, 2 h, process-oriented, Rogerian group psychotherapy sessions, in which a psychologist facilitated emotional expression and discussion of topics pertinent to chronic pain and opioid use/misuse. This client-centered SG format was validated in prior RCTs of MORE (Garland et al., 