The role of athletes' pain-related anxiety in pain-related attentional processes

Abstract

Numerous researchers have highlighted the social determinants of athletes' attitude toward pain, yet little is known about the role of cognitive processes and emotions that are related to pain in sport endeavors. There is evidence, in a dot probe paradigm, that individuals with chronic pain selectively orient their attention toward pain-related stimuli, but no studies have differentiated between the two attentional processes of hypervigilance that are evident in athletes: facilitated detection of threat and difficulty in disengaging attention from threatening stimuli. In the present study using a dot probe paradigm, we examined whether professional rugby players (N=58) with high pain-related anxiety (HPA) would show an attentional bias for pain-related threat, and whether this hypervigilance would reflect difficulty disengaging from threat or facilitated detection of threat. Rugby players with HPA oriented their attention toward pain-related threat with a concomitant difficulty disengaging from threat. Difficulty disengaging from painful stimuli may increase anxiety, and thus be maladaptive in sport. This is the first study to identify pain-related anxiety as a vulnerability marker in athletes' attentional biases.

Activation of GPR30 attenuates chronic pain-related anxiety in ovariectomized mice

“…Anxiety disorder is a comorbid condition of chronic pain (Bardel et al, 2013;Lucchetti et al, 2013). Analgesics and anxiolytics are currently used to manage pain and anxiety symptoms.…”

“…However, chronic pain (also referred to as persistent pain) persists for a prolonged period and is usually caused by various diseases or abnormal conditions (Siddall and Cousins, 2004). Chronic pain is highly associated with mood disorders, such as anxiety and depression (Bardel et al, 2013;Blackburn-Munro and Blackburn-Munro, 2001;Rouwette et al, 2012). Patients suffering from chronic pain also experience emotional disorders, such as depression, associated with additional pain complaints and impairment (Smith, 1992).…”

Attentional avoidance in peer victimized individuals with and without psychiatric disorders

“…In line with previous studies, trials with reaction times lower than 150 ms or higher than 2000 ms were excluded from analyses [9,105,106]. In addition, trials where participants indicated the wrong location of the probe (error trials) were excluded.…”

The Influence of Mindfulness on Upper Extremity Illness

“…There is evidence that patients with high pain-related anxiety and patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain selectively orient their attention toward painful stimuli, reflecting difficulty disengaging from painful stimuli rather than hypervigilance [3,9,28]. Among patients with chronic back pain, greater awareness of symptoms seems to increase disability in the presence of catastrophic thinking [7,13].…”