The Influence Of Pain Psychological Resilience And Threat Situation On The Attention Bias Of Pain-related Information

Attentional biases(ABs)have an important role in the development and management of pain.Leading cognitive-behavior accounts posit that pain is a threat that is processed preferentially compared to neutral events.Although numerous studies have evaluated pain-related attention biases based on reaction time results have not been consistent;hypervigilance and avoidance of pain cues have both been observed in addition to null effects,depending on the nature of stimuli and experimental tasks.In addition,reaction time provides only a snapshot of attention biases typically after stimulus offsets.Eye-tracking technology offers an alternative approach that permits the assessment of dynamic courses of visual attention during stimulus presentations.Although eye-tracking studies of pain-related attention biases have proliferated during the past several years,there has not been a systematic review or meta-analysis on this literature.Hence,it is not clear whether consistent patterns of biases related to orienting and/or maintenance of attention towards pain have been found or specific methodological factors moderate such biases.Study 1 of this thesis presents a review and meta-analysis of eye-tracking studies to address this issue.Furthermore,although recent evidence suggests pain-related visual cues that signal impending painful somatosensory stimulation increase vigilance compared to pain-related visual cues that signal visual probes,non-equivalence in response requirements of impending pain tasks versus dot probe tasks is a potential confound in interpreting such effects.Study 2 addresses this confound by comparing attention biases toward pain-related visual cues in an impending pain task versus a newly created impending touch task.The two tasks used identical instructions,stimulus sets and response requirements and differed solely on the basis of post-offset stimulation that was painful or not painful.Study 1:This meta-analysis investigated whether attentional bias,i.e.the preferential allocation of attention to information that is related to pain,is a ubiquitous phenomenon.We also investigated whether attentional bias effects are related to procedural differences in their visual stimuli types or experimental paradigms,or to individual differences in pain experience.Method: A total of 530 references were screened,resulting in a final sample of 1073 participants from 16 articles.First fixation direction,first fixation latency and overall gaze duration were considered to be three kinds of ABs indexes to run meta-analysis.Results: 1.All participants showed significant first fixation direction bias and overall gaze duration bias to pain-related information,though their heterogeneity are both high,and no first fixation latency bias was found.2.Chronic pain patients showed significant eye gaze biases within more initial orientation to,longer total gaze on pain-related information,compared to healthy people,while there was no pain-related eye-movement biases in healthy people.3.Moderator analyses in all participants identified various visual stimuli types and experimental paradigms could affected the presence and magnitude of eye-movement bias indexes.Conclusion: As assumed,pain can be given priority to attention.The pain-related attentional biases plays a role in the development of chronic pain which need more studies to investigate specific mechanism under the consideration of proper visual stimuli and experimental paradigm.Study 2: We evaluated pain-related biases in orienting and maintenance of gaze within lower versus higher threat contexts and examined pain resilience as an individual differences influence on potential biases.Method: The final sample N = 64(25 female,39 male)is the healthy college students who participated in all the tasks.First,they were assessed during standardized pain-neutral(P-N)image pair presentations(2000ms)of an impending touch task(lower threat context)versus an impending pain task(higher threat context)whereby image pair offsets were followed by potential non-painful touch and potential pain stimulation,respectively.After that,the participants questionnaires including pain Resilience Scale(PRS),then performed in Cold pressor Test(CPT).Results: 1.Within each task,participants were significantly more likely to fixate first upon pain images in P-N pairs and maintain gaze on these images for longer overall durations during trials;2.Between task comparisons indicated pain-related biases in orienting and maintenance were significantly stronger when image pairs signaled potential pain rather than impending touch;3.within the impending pain task,higher pain-resilience levels were related to less prolonged first fixation durations and overall gaze durations towards pain images;4.pain resilience was positive related with pain tolerance.Conclusion: The threat of pain will affect the pain-related attention bias in healthy people.pain resilience can promote healthy people’s attention to disengage from the pain-related cues,which suggest that positive factors have certain significance for the clinical treatment of chronic pain patience.