Hypervigilance and attentional fixedness in chronic musculoskeletal pain: consistency of findings across modified stroop and dot-probe tasks

Abstract

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.

Perspective: 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.