Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau S.A.R.
Pain. 2019 Oct;160(10):2221-2228. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001614.
In previous studies that examined the impact of attention biases (ABs) on later pain outcomes, reaction times (RTs) in response to brief stimulus presentations had been used as measures of attention. Consequently, little is known about effects of ABs assessed during presentations of cues or biases in prolonged attention towards pain stimuli as influences on subsequent functioning. To address these gaps, 89 adults with chronic pain (68 women, 21 men) engaged in a baseline dot-probe task in which visual attention was tracked during injury-neutral (I-N) image pair presentations as well as a 6-month follow-up reassessing pain intensity and interference from pain. Neither RTs to probes after image pair offsets nor biases in initial orienting of gaze towards injury images predicted follow-up outcomes. However, participants who gazed at injury images for longer durations during I-N trials reported significantly more pain and interference at follow-up than did peers who gazed at injury images for less time, even after the impact of other significant baseline predictors had been controlled. In sum, results provided initial evidence for gaze biases reflecting prolonged vigilance towards pain-related information as a potential risk factor for relative elevations in pain and interference from chronic pain.
在先前研究注意力偏差 (ABs) 对后续疼痛结果的影响时，曾使用对简短刺激呈现的反应时间 (RT) 作为注意力的衡量标准。因此，对于在疼痛刺激的长时间注意力呈现中评估 ABs 的影响，以及其对后续功能的影响，我们知之甚少。为了解决这些差距，89 名慢性疼痛患者（68 名女性，21 名男性）参与了基线点探测任务，在该任务中，在损伤中性 (I-N) 图像对呈现期间跟踪视觉注意力，以及 6 个月后重新评估疼痛强度和疼痛干扰。图像对偏移后探针的 RT 或初始注视偏向损伤图像的偏差均不能预测后续结果。然而，与注视损伤图像时间较短的同龄人相比，在 I-N 试验中注视损伤图像时间较长的参与者在随访时报告的疼痛和干扰明显更多，即使在控制了其他重要基线预测因素的影响之后也是如此。总之，结果初步提供了证据，表明注视偏差反映了对与疼痛相关信息的长时间警觉，这可能是慢性疼痛中疼痛和干扰相对升高的一个潜在风险因素。
