Seminar: The role of attention biases in the development, maintenance and management of chronic pain

Professor Louise Sharpe from the University of Sydney will be presenting her work on using attention to help manage chronic pain.

Friday Psychology Seminar Series 

Abstract:

Chronic pain patients demonstrate attentional biases towards pain-related stimuli. However, their clinical importance has yet to be established. The aim of this presentation is to determine (1) whether patients with chronic pain demonstrate attentional biases; (2) whether attentional biases predict subsequent function; and (3) whether interventions that change attentional biases result in clinical improvements. There is now clear evidence that attentional biases exist in chronic pain patients that are not evident in healthy people. However, these biases do not appear to be associated with function.  However, biases away from affective pain information or towards positive stimuli consistently predicted subsequent pain reports, when stimuli were presented for 500ms, indicating strategic avoidance of negative stimuli. In the only study to investigate vigilance (100ms presentation of stimuli with a mask), speeded response to painful stimuli predicted subsequent pain. Further, there was evidence that interventions targeting attentional biases resulted in changes in pain in both analogue and clinical samples. These results suggest that attentional biases in pain are more complex than initially thought, but appear to be important, at least in the development and management of pain.