An experimental investigation of the construct validity of the McGill Pain Questionnaire

Pearce, Joanne; Morley, Stephen

doi:10.1016/0304-3959(89)90182-6

Cited by 108 publications

(90 citation statements)

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“…It has been recently shown that individuals who are highly pain-sensitive, as measured by experimental pain sensitivity, are also attentionally more engaged with pain-related stimuli, (Baum et al, 2011). In a classical Stroop task (Pearce & Morley, 1989), highly pain-sensitive people were slower than less pain-sensitive subjects in naming the color of the words when they were presented with pain-related stimuli, thus showing an attentional bias towards pain-related information.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words

et al. 2016

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Please only quote the published version: http://dx.doi.org/10. 1017/langcog.2016.29 Published in Language and Cognition 2016 AbstractThis study explores the relation between pain sensitivity and the cognitive processing of words. 130 participants evaluated the pain-relatedness of a total of 600 two-syllabic nouns, and subsequently reported on their own pain sensitivity. The results demonstrate that pain-sensitive people associate words more strongly with pain than less sensitive people. In particular, concrete nouns like syringe, wound, knife, and cactus, are considered to be more painrelated for those who are more pain-sensitive. These findings dovetail with recent studies suggesting that certain bodily characteristics influence the way people form mental representations (Casasanto, 2009). We discuss three mechanisms which could potentially account for our findings: attention and memory bias, prototype analysis, and embodied cognition. We argue that whereas none of these three accounts can be ruled out, the embodied cognition hypothesis provides a particularly promising view to accommodate our data.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words

et al. 2016

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“…There is very little research that directly examines hypervigilance in pain patients who report pain-related fear. Based on their study investigating the construct validity of the McGill pain questionnaire, Pearce and Morley (1989) suggested that patients with chronic pain are characterized by selective attention towards cues that are thematically related to pain and its consequences. A more recent replication with the dot-probe paradigm, Asmundson et al (1997) found that individuals with chronic pain with low anxiety sensitivity were able to shift their attention away from stimuli related to pain, in contrast to the subjects with high pain sensitivity.…”

Section: Attention To Bodily Sensationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear-avoidance and its consequences in chronic musculoskeletal pain: a state of the art

Vlaeyen

Linton

2000

Pain

3,955

171

2,797

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In an attempt to explain how and why some individuals with musculoskeletal pain develop a chronic pain syndrome, Lethem et al. (Lethem J, Slade PD, Troup JDG, Bentley G. Outline of a fear-avoidance model of exaggerated pain perceptions. Behav Res Ther 1983;21:401±408) introduced a so-called`fear-avoidance' model. The central concept of their model is fear of pain.`Confrontation' and`avoidance' are postulated as the two extreme responses to this fear, of which the former leads to the reduction of fear over time. The latter, however, leads to the maintenance or exacerbation of fear, possibly generating a phobic state. In the last decade, an increasing number of investigations have corroborated and re®ned the fear-avoidance model. The aim of this paper is to review the existing evidence for the mediating role of painrelated fear, and its immediate and long-term consequences in the initiation and maintenance of chronic pain disability. We ®rst highlight possible precursors of pain-related fear including the role negative appraisal of internal and external stimuli, negative affectivity and anxiety sensitivity may play. Subsequently, a number of fear-related processes will be discussed including escape and avoidance behaviors resulting in poor behavioral performance, hypervigilance to internal and external illness information, muscular reactivity, and physical disuse in terms of deconditioning and guarded movement. We also review the available assessment methods for the quanti®cation of pain-related fear and avoidance. Finally, we discuss the implications of the recent ®ndings for the prevention and treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain. Although there are still a number of unresolved issues which merit future research attention, pain-related fear and avoidance appear to be an essential feature of the development of a chronic problem for a substantial number of patients with musculoskeletal pain. q

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“…In the modified Stroop version, the color words are replaced by emotionally valent, often threat related, words and neutral words [161]. In pain research, the threat-related words consist of pain-related words [116]. Participants are instructed to identify as fast as possible the color of the word, while ignoring the meaning of the word.…”

Section: Meta-analytic Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Pain researchers have typically adopted hypotheses and paradigms from psychopathology research. In the first study on this topic, Pearce and Morley (1989) adapted the modified Stroop task, and presented pain patients with cards containing colored words [116]. They instructed participants to name the color of the words while ignoring word meaning.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Attentional bias to pain-related information: A meta-analysis

Crombez¹,

Ryckeghem²,

Eccleston³

et al. 2013

Pain

283

343

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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 the methodological quality of the study, to procedural differences in their measurement, or to individual differences in pain severity, pain-related fear, anxiety and depression. Results indicated that individuals who experience chronic pain (n=1023) display an attentional bias towards pain-related words or pictures, but this bias was of a small effect size (d=0.134), and did not differ from that in control groups (d=0.082; n=1398). No evidence was found for an attentional bias towards pain-related words and pictures for acute pain (d=0.049), procedural pain (d=0.142), and experimental pain (d=0.069). However, research in which attentional bias towards signals of impending experimental pain in healthy volunteers was investigated, revealed an attentional bias of medium effect size (d=0.676). Moderator analyses in the chronic pain group identified important procedural variables that affected the presence and magnitude of an attentional bias towards pain-related words and pictures, i.e. type INTRODUCTIONAttending toward, dwelling upon, and switching away from pain, have emerged as core components of many cognitive-affective models that seek to explain pain, distress and disability [45,77,154]. Particularly influential is the idea that patients selectively attend to pain at the cost of other information in the environment. This idea has been variably discussed as somatosensory amplification [12,98], hypervigilance [23,35], and more recently as attentional bias [81,120,129,135].The concept of attentional bias was originally introduced by information processing accounts of psychopathology [13,47,92,103]. Attentional bias, or preferentially attending to information that is related to the content of the emotional concerns of patients, has proven to be a robust phenomenon in many forms of psychopathology [21,25,50,117,165]. For example, patients with phobic and anxiety disorders display an attentional bias to threat-related words or pictures [11]. In many of these models biased information processing is not considered epiphenomenal, but instead is invoked as a predisposing, initiating, exacerbating, or maintaining feature of the disorder [11,58,93]. Although much research is correlational, some longitudinal and interventional studies support these accounts [58].Attentional bias to pain-related information is also the subject of significant research activity in pain [4,9,81,120,154,157]. Pain researchers have typically adopted hypotheses and paradigms from psychopathology research. In the first study on this topic, Pearce and Morley (1989) adapted the modified Stroop task, and presented pain patients with cards containing colored words [116]. They instructed participants to name the color of the words while ignoring word meaning. In comparison with control subjects, patients ...

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An experimental investigation of the construct validity of the McGill Pain Questionnaire

Cited by 108 publications

References 13 publications

Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words

Reading words hurts: the impact of pain sensitivity on people’s ratings of pain-related words

Fear-avoidance and its consequences in chronic musculoskeletal pain: a state of the art

Attentional bias to pain-related information: A meta-analysis

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