Attentional bias toward pictorial representations of pain in individuals with chronic headache

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Description/Abstract

Objectives: This study investigated attentional biases for pictorial headache-related stimuli in individuals with chronic headache and healthy controls.

Methods: Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task that presented headache-related images and neutral images at 2 exposure duration conditions, 500 and 1250 ms.

Results: The results indicated that individuals with chronic daily headache showed a significantly greater overall attentional bias across presentation times toward headache-related stimuli compared with the controls, which indicates a bias in both initial orienting and maintained attention to pain cues in this group.

Discussion: It is concluded that both hypervigilance and sustained processing are critical factors for the maintenance of chronic pain.