Introduction:According to the pain research literature, attentional bias for pain is the mechanism responsible for the development and maintenance of fear of pain in patients with chronic pain. However, there is still some debate about the exact mechanism and the role of faster engagement versus difficulty in disengagement in the development of attentional bias.Methods:To investigate attentional bias in patients with chronic pain, we used an eye-tracker with the pictures of pain-provoking activities and compared the results with an age- and gender-matched group of pain-free participants. In addition, other measures of pain-related cognition and pain severity ratings were included to assess their contribution to the attentional bias toward pain-related information.Results:Calculating the frequency of the first fixations showed that both groups fixated initially on pain-provoking pictures compared to neutral one. Calculating the speed of fixations showed that control participants were faster in fixating on neutral stimuli, but patients with pain were faster in fixating on pain-provoking pictures, indicating a relative vigilance for the pain-related stimuli among them. These patients reported that the intensity of pain in the previous week was positively correlated with the speed of their fixation on the painful stimuli.Conclusion:Although these results did not provide unequivocal support for the vigilance-avoidance hypothesis, they are generally consistent with the results of studies using eye tracking technology. Furthermore, our findings put a question over characterization of attentional biases in patients with chronic pain by simply relating that to difficulty in disengaging from pain-related stimuli.
Objective: Moving Shapes paradigm is a test that evaluates intentionality as a theory of mind (ToM) component. This study aimed to assess the normative data and reliability of this test in a community sample of 9-11-year-old children.
Method: A total of 398 children aged between 9 and 11 years were recruited from mainstream elementary schools through a random cluster sampling. All participants were evaluated using the Moving Shapes paradigm. To evaluate test-retest reliability, the test was administered again after 2-4 weeks.
Results: The intentionality mean score was 29.70 (+5.88) out of 60. There was no significant difference between girls and boys in test scores. Age was not significantly related to the paradigm variables scores. Ten percent of the participants achieved the scores below 22, and 10% above 37. Cronbach’s Alfa was 0.40 for the intentionality score. The test-retest reliability was fair to good (0.43 - 0.79) for different groups of animations. The inter-rater agreement was 80%.
Conclusion: The study found that the Moving shapes paradigm is a reliable instrument to evaluate intentionality in normal school-aged children.
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