Attentional bias toward pictorial representations of pain in individuals with chronic headache.

OBJECTIVES

This study investigated attentional biases for pictorial headache-related stimuli in individuals with chronic headache and healthy controls.

METHODS

Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task that presented headache-related images and neutral images at 2 exposure duration conditions, 500 and 1250 ms.

RESULTS

The results indicated that individuals with chronic daily headache showed a significantly greater overall attentional bias across presentation times toward headache-related stimuli compared with the controls, which indicates a bias in both initial orienting and maintained attention to pain cues in this group.

DISCUSSION

It is concluded that both hypervigilance and sustained processing are critical factors for the maintenance of chronic pain.