The presence research community would benefit from a reliable and valid crossmedia presence measure that allows results from different laboratories to be compared and a more comprehensive knowledge base to be developed. The ITC-Sense of Presence Inventory (ITC-SOPI) is a new state questionnaire measure whose development has been informed by previous research on the determinants of presence and current self-report measures. It focuses on users' experiences of media, with no reference to objective system parameters. More than 600 people completed the ITC-SOPI following an experience with one of a range of noninteractive and interactive media. Exploratory analysis (principal axis factoring) revealed four factors: Sense of Physical Space, Engagement, Ecological Validity, and Negative Effects. Relations between the factors and the consistency of the factor structure with others reported in the literature are discussed. Preliminary analyses described here demonstrate that the ITC-SOPI is reliable and valid, but more rigorous testing of its psychometric properties and applicability to interactive virtual environments is required. Subject to satisfactory confirmatory analyses, the ITC-SOPI will offer researchers using a range of media systems a tool with which to measure four facets of a media experience that are putatively related to presence.

Recent research indicates that people who are fearful of pain tend to report more negative pain experiences. It also seems that attentional mechanisms may be particularly important in the perception of painful stimuli, especially amongst pain fearful individuals. Drawing on a paradigm used to examine biased cognitive processes in the emotional disorders, the current study investigated whether the fear of pain would be related to a greater selective attentional bias in favour of pain-related stimuli. In order to determine the nature of this bias, stimuli material were varied in terms of whether they were related to pain sensations, were related to socially threatening situations or were relatively positive. Those with a high fear of pain exhibited a selective attentional bias towards pain-related information, compared to those classified as low in the fear of pain. No group differences were found for either social threat or positive stimuli. These results indicate that one reason why those with a high fear of pain are particularly susceptible to negative pain experiences could be due to biased attentional processes. Suggestions for cognitive interventions designed to reduce such biases are discussed, as are directions for future research.

Pain is known to disrupt attentional performance in both healthy adults and patients with chronic pain. Exactly which aspects of attentional function are affected are, however, still to be determined. The primary aim of this investigation was to systematically examine the effects of experimentally induced pain on a range of attentional performance tasks. Following a review of tests of attentional disruption, seven best candidate tasks were selected and examined across seven experiments. The tasks were: continuous performance, flanker, endogenous precueing, n-back, inhibition, attentional switching, and divided attention. Healthy adult participants performed each of these tasks under three different conditions: a painful heat sensation, a warm heat sensation, and a nonheat control. Pain differentially affected attentional performance across these tasks; pain-related attentional impairment was found on the n-back, attentional switching, and divided attention tasks, but not on the other tasks. This finding suggests that the aspects of attention most affected by pain are those essential for the completion of complex tasks that require the processing of multiple cues and control over attentional deployment. These results are discussed in the context of an emerging view of pain as a demand for executive control and the development of measures that could be used to examine attentional disruption in the context of pain.

Research consistently indicates that gender differences exist in pain perception, with females typically reporting more negative responses to pain than males. It also seems as if males and females use and benefit from different coping strategies when under stress; females seem to prefer emotion-focused coping, whereas males prefer sensory-focused coping. Unfortunately, experimental research that examines such differences in the context of pain has not yet been adequately investigated. The aim of the current study was, therefore, to determine whether gender differences would be found in the effect that sensory-focused and emotion-focused coping instructions have on cold pressor pain experiences. Participants consisted of 24 male and 26 female healthy adults, all of whom reported no current pain. A consistent pattern of effects was found, over both behavioural and self-report measures of pain. Compared to females, males exhibited less negative pain responses when focusing on the sensory component of pain (i.e. increased threshold, tolerance and lower sensory pain). Furthermore, compared to sensory focusing, emotional focusing was found to increase the affective pain experience of females. Together these results confirm that important differences exist between men and women in the effects pain coping instructions have on the experience of pain. The implications of such findings for research and practice are discussed.

No abstract