Eleven interpretations of personal suffering.

Suffering is carefully defined in contrast to pain as the psychological experience being investigated. Under consideration, however, is only one's own suffering and not the suffering of other people. Interpretation is identified as the way of perceiving personal suffering. In a nine sentence paragraph the statements describe the perceptual, affective, and action-tending components of an attitude. The implications of assuming a particular attitude are brought to light in summary fashion in another paragraph. Eleven attitudes toward personal suffering are thus described and criticized. An attitude scale of 99 items is constructed from the descriptive statements of these 11 attitudes toward personal suffering. Plans for further research are indicated.