The anticipation of pain at a specific location of the body prioritizes tactile stimuli at that location

2015

Psychological Research

Self Cite

Recent studies have suggested that the threat of pain may redirect attention towards specific features of the pain stimulus via attentional control settings. For instance, it has been shown that anticipating pain results in attentional prioritization of the location where pain is expected. In contemporary theories on attention and pain, it has been argued that pain control motivation-e.g., attempting to avoid pain-is capable of enhancing these effects. The present study investigated if the threat of pain prioritizes attention towards somatosensory input over other sensory information, and if pursuing a pain control goal augments this effect. In a Temporal Order Judgment experiment, 41 participants were presented with visuo-tactile stimulus pairs and asked to judge which stimulus they had perceived first. Half of all trials were associated with the threat of acute pain, while the other half was not. Furthermore, half of our sample was encouraged to avoid the administration of pain by means of a specified behavioral response, whereas the other half was not. In line with our hypotheses, we found the threat of pain to prioritize attention towards the somatosensory modality, i.e., participants tended to perceive the tactile stimulus as occurring earlier in time than the visual stimulus. Interestingly, in-depth analyses suggested that this effect was predominantly carried by participants who were engaged in pain control efforts. These findings support the idea that pain goals exert top-down attentional control prioritizing pain-relevant sensory information. Clinical relevance and future directions are discussed.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Let it be? Pain control attempts critically amplify attention to somatosensory input

Durnez

2015

Psychological Research

Self Cite

“…A shift in PSS values could then reflect a bias in the decision process, rather than a genuinely perceptual effect of pain anticipation (for a more extensive discussion of response bias in TOJ tasks, see García-Pérez & Alcalá-Quintana, 2012;Spence & Parise, 2010). Filbrich et al (2016) argued that it is likely that the instructions used in our studies (Vanden Bulcke et al, 2013 have strongly induced such response bias. Specifically, they state that "participants were explicitly instructed to attend one side of space", that "participants reported more often the side of space they had been instructed to attend, that is, the side of the threat", and that "participants simply resolved temporal uncertainty by choosing the side of space they expected to be the most taskrelevant" (page 136).…”

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confidence: 92%

“…We can only express strong disagreement with their interpretation. In fact, we have consistently and explicitly warned against conclusions in terms of pain-specificity (Van Damme et al, 2002;Vanden Bulcke et al, 2013). Even more, we have been amongst the first to systematically argue that a search for what is unique to pain, has led to an unduly focus on the sensory characteristics of the experience, distracting from the central role of its affective-motivational (Eccleston & Crombez, 1999).…”

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confidence: 98%

“…The TOJ methodology is based upon Titchener's law of prior entry, stating that attended stimuli come to consciousness more quickly than unattended stimuli (Spence & Parise, 2010). We adapted this methodology to examine if threat of pain at a certain body location biased attention to that location (Vanden Bulcke, Van Damme, Durnez, & Crombez, 2013). Specifically, we asked participants to report which one of two tactile stimuli, one administered to each hand at a range of different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), was perceived first.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Analysis of PSS values indicated that in trials during which pain was expected, there was a 6 shift of attention to the threatened hand (Vanden Bulcke et al, 2013). Follow-up studies replicated this effect, and additionally showed that pain-related bias was not limited to the exact pain location but even generalized to other body parts of the same body half (Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Spence, & Van Damme, 2014), and that similar effects could be found when using visual instead of tactile TOJ suggesting that prioritization is not limited to somatosensory information (Vanden Bulcke et al, 2015).…”

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confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Attentional bias to pain-relevant body locations: New methods, new challenges

Consciousness and Cognition

Bulcke

Durnez

et al. 2016

Self Cite

In a recent issue of Consciousness and Cognition, Filbrich, Torta, Vanderclausen, Azanon, and Legrain (2016) commented on a paper in which we used a tactile Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) task to show that expecting pain on a specific body location biased attention to that location (Vanden Bulcke, Crombez, Durnez, & Van Damme, 2015). Their main criticism is that the effects are likely to reflect response bias rather than genuine attentional bias. We agree that the TOJ task used may be susceptible to response bias, and welcome the authors' methodological suggestions to control for such bias. However, we feel that certain aspects of our work are misrepresented in their paper. Most importantly, we contest their argument that our instructions made the threat location task-relevant, thereby increasing risk of response bias. Further, we reply to other methodological and theoretical issues raised by these authors.

Hypervigilance for innocuous tactile stimuli in patients with fibromyalgia: An experimental approach

European Journal of Pain

Hulle

Spence

et al. 2014

Background: Hypervigilance, i.e., excessive attention, is often invoked as a potential explanation for the observation that many individuals with fibromyalgia show a heightened sensitivity to stimulation in various sensory modalities, such as touch and hearing. Compelling evidence for this assumption is, however, lacking. The aim of the present study was to investigate the presence of somatosensory hypervigilance in patients with fibromyalgia. Methods: Fibromyalgia patients (n = 41) and a matched control group (n = 40) performed a tactile change detection task in which they had to detect whether there was a change between two consecutively presented patterns of tactile stimuli presented to various body locations. The task was performed under two conditions: in the unpredictable condition, tactile changes occurred equally often at all possible body locations; in the predictable condition, the majority of tactile changes occurred at one specific body location. Results: It was hypothesized that the fibromyalgia group would show better tactile change detection in the unpredictable condition and when changes ocurred at unexpected locations in the predictable condition. The results did not support this hypothesis. In neither condition was the fibromyalgia group better than the control group in detecting tactile changes. Conclusions: No evidence was found to support the claim that patients with fibromyalgia display somatosensory hypervigilance. This finding challenges the idea of hypervigilance as a static feature of fibromyalgia and urges for a more dynamic view in which hypervigilance emerges in situations when bodily threat is experienced.