The Psychology of Itch: Current Evidence and Future Directions

Beugen, Sylvia van; Laarhoven, Antoinette I. M. van; Koulil, Saskia Spillekom‐van; Evers, Andrea

doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-818697-8.00144-8

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…However, very fast and automatic avoidance of itch-related stimuli can still be explained by its protective function, because the ultimate goal is to avoid the source of the potential threat [5][6][7]. In addition, scratching is stigmatized [45][46][47][48] which could explain why people avoid the itch-related stimuli. Actually, this could be adaptive as long as someone is not directly in contact with someone who is scratching: infection through a picture is not possible.…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

No preconscious attentional bias towards itch in healthy individuals

et al. 2022

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Rapidly attending towards potentially harmful stimuli to prevent possible damage to the body is a critical component of adaptive behavior. Research suggests that individuals display an attentional bias, i.e., preferential allocation of attention, for consciously perceived bodily sensations that signal potential threat, like itch or pain. Evidence is not yet clear whether an attentional bias also exists for stimuli that have been presented for such a short duration that they do not enter the stream of consciousness. This study investigated whether a preconscious attentional bias towards itch-related pictures exists in 127 healthy participants and whether this can be influenced by priming with mild itch-related stimuli compared to control stimuli. Mild itch was induced with von Frey monofilaments and scratching sounds, while control stimuli where of matched modalities but neutral. Attentional bias was measured with a subliminal pictorial dot-probe task. Moreover, we investigated how attentional inhibition of irrelevant information and the ability to switch between different tasks, i.e., cognitive flexibility, contribute to the emergence of an attentional bias. Attentional inhibition was measured with a Flanker paradigm and cognitive flexibility was measured with a cued-switching paradigm. Contrary to our expectations, results showed that participants attention was not biased towards the itch-related pictures, in facts, attention was significantly drawn towards the neutral pictures. In addition, no effect of the itch-related priming was observed. Finally, this effect was not influenced by participants’ attentional inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Therefore, we have no evidence for a preconscious attentional bias towards itch stimuli. The role of preconscious attentional bias in patients with chronic itch should be investigated in future studies.

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