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The emotional stroop task and chronic pain: what is threatening for chronic pain sufferers?
Author(s) -
Crombez Geert,
Hermans Dirk,
Adriaensen Hugo
Publication year - 2000
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 - 10.1053/eujp.1999.0149
Subject(s) - stroop effect , chronic pain , attentional bias , psychology , pain catastrophizing , psychosocial , affect (linguistics) , clinical psychology , audiology , psychiatry , cognition , medicine , communication
Using a computer version of the emotional stroop task, it was investigated whether chronic pain patients display an involuntary attentional shift towards pain‐related information (sensory, affective pain words and injury related words). Multiple regression analyses were used to investigate which pain and psychosocial variables (pain severity, pain‐related fear, pain catastrophizing and negative affect) were predictive of attentional bias. Results indicated: (1) that there was an attentional bias towards the sensory pain words; and (2) that current pain intensity was predictive of the effect. No other attentional effects were found. The results are discussed in terms of possible reasons for the difficulty of demonstrating attentional bias in chronic pain patients. Copyright 2000 European Federation of Chapters of the International Association for the Study of Pain