Asmundson Gordon J G, Wright Kristi D, Hadjistavropoulos Heather D
Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies, Department of Psychology, University of Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.
J Pain. 2005 Aug;6(8):497-506. doi: 10.1016/j.jpain.2005.02.012.
Results from modified Stroop and dot-probe tasks have provided mixed evidence regarding attentional biases for sensory and affect pain stimuli in chronic pain patients. No studies have compared the same groups of chronic pain and healthy control participants on both tasks. We tested 36 patients with chronic musculoskeletal pain and 29 healthy control subjects on the modified Stroop and dot-probe tasks. Stimuli comprised affect pain, sensory pain, physical catastrophe, and neutral words. There was no evidence to suggest differential processing of threat cues by patients and control subjects on the modified Stroop task. All participants did, however, show differential processing of affect pain words. This was evident on both masked and unmasked presentation formats. There were no significant interactions between clinical status and threat word type observed for any of the indices of selective attention derived from the dot-probe task, but all participants had difficulty disengaging attention from affective pain and health catastrophe words. Findings were not influenced by individual differences in mood, anxiety, or fear of pain. Correlational analyses of the standard (unmasked) Stroop interference index and dot-probe indices of selective attention revealed a consistent lack of significant association, suggesting that the 2 tasks might be measuring different phenomena. Taken together, these findings provide evidence that chronic pain patients and healthy control participants do not differ in the way they attend to threatening linguistic stimuli.
Some patients with chronic pain might have trouble paying attention to anything other than the affective components of pain and associated catastrophic health consequences. Interventions that specifically target this attentional fixedness might facilitate shifting attention to other targets and thereby reduce pain-specific anxiety and fear.
改良版斯特鲁普任务和点探测任务的结果，就慢性疼痛患者对感觉性和情感性疼痛刺激的注意偏向而言，提供了不一致的证据。尚无研究在这两项任务上对同一组慢性疼痛患者和健康对照参与者进行比较。我们在改良版斯特鲁普任务和点探测任务中测试了36名慢性肌肉骨骼疼痛患者和29名健康对照者。刺激物包括情感性疼痛、感觉性疼痛、身体灾难和中性词语。没有证据表明患者和对照者在改良版斯特鲁普任务中对威胁线索的加工存在差异。然而，所有参与者对情感性疼痛词语的加工都存在差异。这在掩蔽和非掩蔽呈现形式中都很明显。从点探测任务得出的任何选择性注意指标，均未观察到临床状态与威胁词类型之间的显著交互作用，但所有参与者在将注意力从情感性疼痛和健康灾难词语上脱离时都存在困难。研究结果不受情绪、焦虑或对疼痛的恐惧等个体差异的影响。对标准（非掩蔽）斯特鲁普干扰指数和点探测选择性注意指数的相关性分析显示，始终缺乏显著关联，这表明这两项任务可能测量的是不同现象。综合来看，这些发现提供了证据，表明慢性疼痛患者和健康对照参与者在关注威胁性语言刺激的方式上没有差异。
一些慢性疼痛患者可能难以将注意力集中在疼痛的情感成分和相关灾难性健康后果之外的任何事情上。专门针对这种注意力固定的干预措施可能有助于将注意力转移到其他目标上，从而减轻特定于疼痛的焦虑和恐惧。
