Experimental pain induces attentional bias that is modified by enhanced motivation: An eye tracking study

Abstract

This study was the first that revealed the impact of acute experimental pain on attentional bias towards pain-related information in healthy individuals through eye tracking. It may provide a possible solution to reduce hypervigilance towards pain-related information by altering the motivational relevance. WHAT DOES THIS STUDY ADD?: (1) This study revealed the impact of experimental pain on attentional bias in healthy individuals; (2) This study may provide a possible approach of altering motivational relevance to control the pain-induced attentional bias towards pain-related information.

Eye‐movement behaviours when viewing real‐world pain‐related images

“…As such, the present pattern of results is unsurprising. The results are also in line with the majority of studies to date that, using diverse cognitive paradigms, have explored attentional biases towards pain‐related information in healthy individuals recruited specifically as the target population (Priebe et al, ; Sun et al, ; Vervoort et al, ) or when recruited as a comparison group for chronic pain patients (Fashler & Katz, ; Schoth, Godwin et al, ). Furthermore, by combining a reliable method such as eye tracking (Skinner et al, ) in conjunction with real‐world images that reflect processes normally occurring in people's everyday lives (e.g., seeing someone in pain or viewing pain‐related scenes in the news media), the present study offers a good balance between the internal validity and experimental control needed for scientific progress and the ecological validity necessary for generalizing experimental results.…”

“…Two used a free‐viewing task with face pairs, one reporting bias towards pain expressions relative to neutral faces (initial fixation location and absolute gaze duration up to 1,000 ms) (Priebe, Messingschlager, & Lautenbacher, ), and the other an initial orienting bias (time to first fixation) towards pain expressions relative to neutral faces in low pain catastrophizers (Vervoort, Trost, Prkachin, & Mueller, ). Another using the visual‐probe task found participants who completed a preceding experimental pain task showed increased bias (first‐run dwell time) for pain‐related images compared to participants not exposed to the task (Sun, Wang, & Luo, ).…”

Threat and fear of pain induces attentional bias to pain words: An eye‐tracking study

“…Yang et al, 2012Yang et al, , 2013Vervoort et al, 2013;Sun et al, 2016;Todd et al, 2016a,b). From the data, we took a number of measures that are associated with initial orienting of attention.…”

“…Fixations were defined as a period of at least 100 ms in which the participant held their gaze within an area of 0.5°radius consistent with recent eye-tracking studies (e.g. Yang et al, 2012Yang et al, , 2013Vervoort et al, 2013;Sun et al, 2016;Todd et al, 2016a,b). In addition, we assessed the percentage of trials on which the first fixation was on the pain-related stimulus (e.g.…”

Physical Cue Influences Children’s Empathy for Pain: The Role of Attention Allocation

“…Third, according to physical and social pain overlap theory ( Eisenberger, 2012 ), pain indicated by social cue would be the same as indicated by physical cue, thus further research could consider investigating the influence of social cue to children’s empathy for pain. Sun et al (2016) use pictorial visual-probe task to test whether verbal instruction would influence adults’ attentional bias to painful picture, and they found that the experimental group which received verbal instruction before the tasks would exhibit weaker attention bias toward painful pictures. Fourth, more types of cues could be used, and a study indeed has found that uncertain cues would induce stronger reaction to pain than certain cues ( Lin et al, 2014 ).…”