Premium
Time‐course of attentional bias for pain‐related cues in chronic daily headache sufferers
Author(s) -
Liossi Christina,
Schoth Daniel E.,
Bradley Brendan P.,
Mogg Karin
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
european journal of pain
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.305
H-Index - 109
eISSN - 1532-2149
pISSN - 1090-3801
DOI - 10.1016/j.ejpain.2008.11.007
Subject(s) - attentional bias , psychology , trait anxiety , audiology , headaches , anxiety , chronic pain , stimulus (psychology) , cognitive psychology , neuroscience , medicine , psychiatry
This study investigated attentional biases for linguistic pain‐related stimuli in individuals suffering from chronic headaches and healthy controls. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe (also reported as dot probe in previous investigations) task which presented pain‐related (sensory and affective) and neutral words at two exposure duration conditions, 500 and 1250ms. The results indicated that individuals suffering from chronic headaches showed a significantly greater attentional bias at 1250ms compared to the controls, which indicates a bias in maintained attention to pain cues in this group. No significant differences between groups were found in attentional bias scores at the shorter stimulus duration of 500ms, which instead correlated significantly with trait anxiety. Results are discussed in relation to research into pain‐related and anxiety‐related biases in initial orienting and maintained attention.