Shifts in attention biases in response to acute pain induction: Examination of a model of "conversion" among repressors.

Abstract

Unlike most people, those who are characterized by a repressive coping style report high levels of physical (sensory) pain but low levels of emotional distress (affective pain), which is a discrepancy that may suggest a "conversion" process. In two studies, we tested an attention allocation model, proposing that repressors direct attention away from threatening negative affective information and toward nonthreatening physical pain information during emotionally arousing (painful) situations. In Study 1, 84 participants underwent a cold pressor and then recovered. Repressors reported greater pain during recovery than low- and high-anxious participants, but they reported lower distress than high-anxious participants. Repressors reported significant and large discrepancies between high pain and low distress, whereas these differences were less pronounced for other groups. In Study 2, 77 participants underwent an ischemic pain task while performing a modified dot-probe task with sensory and negative affective pain words as stimuli. Repressors showed increasing biases away from affective pain words and toward sensory pain words as the pain task continued, whereas low- and high-anxious participants did not show these shifts in attention. The results support the notion that conversion among repressors may involve a process by which attention is directed away from emotional distress during noxious stimulation and is focused instead on sensory information from pain.

Attention allocation to ambiguous health/somatic threat cues

“…In research on pain‐related or anxiety‐related attentional bias to unambiguous (word) stimuli, it is common to present stimuli for 500 ms (e.g. Asmundson et al., ; Boston and Sharpe, ; Burns et al., ; Keogh et al., ; Lees et al., ). In addition, evidence has been reported that although both threat and non‐threat meanings of ambiguous words are initially activated, it takes about 750 ms for one meaning to become dominant and enter awareness in high‐anxious individuals (Richards and French, ; Richards, ).…”

Combine or Separate Future Pain? The Impact of Current Pain on Decisions about Future Dental Treatments

“…The literature on emotion and pain has traditionally examined issues related to the measurement of pain [1], the perception and recall of painful experiences [2], the biological properties and alleviating mechanisms of pain [3], the impact of pain on cognitive processes [4], and the impact of patients’ pain on health professionals’ treatment decisions [5]. Interestingly, research from the medical, dental, and decision sciences has been relatively silent on how a patient’s current level of pain influences his/her own treatment decisions [6].…”