Contribution of emotional and instrumental response processes in adaptation to surgery.

Predispositional measures of anxiety, internal-external control, and situational measures of worry, fear, pain, speed of recovery, and doses of analgesics were obtained from 62 female surgical patients. Preoperative measures of fear and worry were (a) positively and linearly related to postoperative emotionality and (/>) unrelated to speed of postoperative recovery and doses of analgesics. Birth order (first and later) and manifest anxiety (high, medium, and low) affected emotionality. Later borns low in manifest anxiety were least emotional; later borns high in manifest anxiety and firstborns either high or low in manifest anxiety were most emotional. Internal-external control was associated with ability to influence care. Internals obtained more needed analgesics, and if they were also firstborn, they had longer hospital stays than externals. The evidence contradicts the hypothesis that preoperativc emotion is causally related to adaptive responses in this stressful situation. The data suggest that emotionality should lie treated as a response and that these responses and instrumental responses can be independent.