Keogh Edmund, Cavill Rebecca, Moore David J, Eccleston Christopher
University of Bath, Bath, UK.
Pain. 2014 Apr;155(4):821-827. doi: 10.1016/j.pain.2014.01.021. Epub 2014 Jan 29.
Pain-related attentional interference has been found in both chronic pain and laboratory-inducted pain settings. However, few studies have examined such interference effects during common everyday painful episodes. Menstrual cycle-related pain is a common pain that affects a large number of women on a regular basis. The purpose of the current study was, therefore, to examine the effects of menstrual pain on attentional interference. Fifty-two healthy adult women were tested during 2 different phases of their menstrual cycles: once during a nonpain phase (mid follicular), and once while experiencing menstrual pain (late luteal/early follicular). On each testing session, participants received a battery of 4 attentional interference tasks that included selective attention (flanker task), attention span (n-back task), attentional switching (switching task), and divided attention (dual task). Greater attentional interference effects were found to occur during the menstrual pain phase compared to the nonpain phase. Interestingly, the nature of this effect was a general worsening in performance (e.g., slowing, less accurate), rather than a specific attentional deficit. These results add to a growing literature that generally indicates that attentional interference occurs across a range of different types of pain, including common painful episodes. However, they also highlight that the specific nature of this interference effect may depend on the type pain under consideration. Implications of these findings are also considered.
疼痛相关的注意力干扰在慢性疼痛和实验室诱导的疼痛情境中均有发现。然而，很少有研究考察在日常常见的疼痛发作期间的这种干扰效应。月经周期相关疼痛是一种常见的疼痛，经常影响大量女性。因此，本研究的目的是考察痛经对注意力干扰的影响。52名健康成年女性在月经周期的两个不同阶段接受测试：一次在非疼痛阶段（卵泡中期），一次在经历痛经时（黄体晚期/卵泡早期）。在每次测试中，参与者接受一系列4种注意力干扰任务，包括选择性注意（侧翼任务）、注意广度（n-back任务）、注意力转换（转换任务）和分散注意（双重任务）。与非疼痛阶段相比，痛经阶段出现了更大的注意力干扰效应。有趣的是，这种效应的本质是表现普遍变差（例如，速度减慢、准确性降低），而不是特定的注意力缺陷。这些结果进一步丰富了越来越多的文献，这些文献总体上表明，注意力干扰在一系列不同类型的疼痛中都会出现，包括常见的疼痛发作。然而，它们也强调，这种干扰效应的具体性质可能取决于所考虑的疼痛类型。这些发现的意义也得到了探讨。
