Attentional bias for pain- and period-related symptom words in healthy women who experienced a recent painful period.

BACKGROUND: Attentional biases for pain-related information have been commonly reported in patients with chronic pain. Biases may also exist in individuals who recently experienced an episode of acute clinical pain, although limited investigation has been conducted. The present study is the first to explore attentional biases in women who experienced recent menstrual pain. METHODS: Seventy healthy women were recruited who experienced a regular menstrual cycle and a recent painful period. All participants completed a visual-probe task with pain-related and period-related symptom words, which were presented at subliminal (14 ms, followed by nonsensical consonant letter string for 286 ms) and supraliminal (300 ms, 1250 ms) exposure durations. Participants then completed a series of self-report measures, including a measure of cyclical perimenstrual symptoms. RESULTS: Recent menstrual pain severity was found to be significantly predictive of attentional bias towards pain-related words presented for 1250 ms. However, no significant evidence of bias was found towards period-related symptom words. CONCLUSIONS: Pain-related attentional biases are associated with recent menstrual pain severity. The experience and severity of pain, rather than its duration (i.e., whether pain is chronic or acute), may be the primary determinants of pain-related attentional bias. Future research could explore attentional biases in acute clinical pain samples to confirm this notion.

Eye movements during visual search for emotional faces in individuals with chronic headache.

BACKGROUND: Attentional biases for pain-related information have been frequently reported in individuals with chronic pain. Recording of participants' eye movements provides a continuous measure of attention, although to date this methodology has received little use in research exploring attentional biases in chronic pain. The aim of the current investigation was to explore the specificity of attentional orienting bias using a novel visual search task while recording participant eye movement behaviours. This also allowed for the investigation of whether attentional biases for pain-related information exist in the presence of multiple stimuli competing for attention. METHODS: Twenty-three participants with chronic headache and 24 pain-free, healthy control participants were engaged in a visual search task where pain, angry, happy and neutral faces were used as both target and distractor stimuli. While completing this task, participants' eye movements were recorded. RESULTS: Supporting the adopted hypothesis, participants with chronic headache, relative to healthy controls, demonstrated a significantly higher proportion of initial fixations to target pain expressions when the pain expressions were presented in displays containing neutral-distractor faces. No significant differences were found between groups in the time taken to fixate target pain expressions (localization time). CONCLUSIONS: Individuals with chronic headache show facilitated initial orienting towards pain expressions specifically when used as targets in a visual search task. This study adds to a growing body of research supporting the presence of pain-related attentional biases in chronic pain as assessed via different experimental paradigms, and shows biases to exist when multiple stimuli competing for attention are presented simultaneously.