PainDynamics · Research on the dynamics of attention bias for pain in daily life.

PainDynamics: Research on the dynamics of attention bias for pain in daily life.

Chronic pain is a major health care problem in Europe which results in huge societal and economic costs. It is furthermore estimated that these cost will only increase with an aging European population. Available cognitive-affective accounts of pain, distress and disability suggest that attention plays a pivotal role in the development and maintenance of pain problems. In particular, the presence of an attention bias towards pain information (AB) is thought to initiate or exacerbate pain problems in chronic pain patients. Despite the intuitive appeal of this idea, findings are inconsistent. In current project it is argued that inconsistent findings in AB research are due to both conceptual and methodological limitations of the available research. From a conceptual point of view, it is argued that the presence of inconsistent findings is owe to the conceptualization of AB as a stable trait-like or habit-like process. Instead, we propose to conceptualize AB as a temporally dynamic, fluctuating and enfolding phenomenon that varies over time and across contexts. From a methodological standpoint, we furthermore argue that varying empirical support may also partly be due to low ecological validity in AB research. It is proposed that the ecological validity could be increased by using actual pain stimuli instead of symbolic stimuli and by investigating AB for pain-related information and key variables in everyday situations instead of in a single laboratory session. In the current project, these conceptual and methodological challenges will be addressed via (1) the development of a novel theoretical framework incorporating the dynamic nature of attention bias and explaining the impact of contextual and motivational variables on the presence and/or absence of attention bias in people experiencing acute or chronic pain, (2) the development and validation of a novel ecologically valid paradigm to assess AB, which overcomes limitations of previous reaction time measures, and (3) the investigation of key hypotheses concerning the role of AB in acute and chronic pain using a novel ecologically valid approach.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз