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

Abstract

Interventions that change attention towards pain to reduce vigilance and subsequent avoidance may be indicated to improve pain outcomes.

The relative efficacy of mindfulness versus distraction: The moderating role of attentional bias

“…For example, Sharpe et al () found that although acute pain patients exhibited a bias towards sensory pain words, it was the avoidance of affective pain words that predicted chronicity three and six months’ later. Two recent laboratory studies have also highlighted the role of avoidance to affective pain words (Brookes, Sharpe, and Dear, ; Sharpe et al, ). For this reason, we also examined the duration of first fixation on affective pain words as a moderator of the relative efficacy of mindfulness versus distraction.…”

“…The experimental attentional bias paradigm was a replication of a previous study using the same eye tracking methodology (Sharpe et al, ). The experimental word stimuli for the dot probe task were developed by Dehghani (Dehghani, Sharpe, and Nicholas, ) and consisted of 10 sensory pain and 10 affective pain words, each matched to a neutral word of equal length and frequency.…”

Rumination induces a pattern of attention characterized by increased vigilance followed by avoidance of affective pain words

“…For example, in eyetracking studies the duration of the first fixation was 206 ms (Todd et al, 2016) to 246 ms (Sharpe et al, 2017). Therefore, these results should be interpreted cautiously.…”

“…In contrast, it was biases away from affective pain words, that predicted chronicity both 3 and 6 months later (Sharpe et al, 2014).The threat interpretation model makes the prediction that under high threat the exact pattern of vigilance-avoidance found here will emerge. Nonetheless, the view that avoidance may be the putative attentional response to pain-related material has been supported by a number of recent eye tracking studies (Yang et al, 2012(Yang et al, , 2013Vervoort et al, 2013a;Heathcote et al, 2017;Sharpe et al, 2017;Todd et al, 2016). Nonetheless, the view that avoidance may be the putative attentional response to pain-related material has been supported by a number of recent eye tracking studies (Yang et al, 2012(Yang et al, , 2013Vervoort et al, 2013a;Heathcote et al, 2017;Sharpe et al, 2017;Todd et al, 2016).…”

“…Some studies show more and longer fixations on pain-related stimuli (e.g. A recent study manipulated threat and examined gaze behaviour and found evidence to support a pattern of increased vigilance and subsequent avoidance in the high threat manipulation for affective-pain words (Sharpe et al, 2017). Todd et al (2015) argue that the level of threat is important.…”