Attention toward interpersonal stimuli in individuals with and without chronic daily headache

Abstract

Attentional capture of threat is a normal and adaptive process, although facilitated processing of mildly threatening stimuli irrelevant to current goals may result in attentional interference and compromised performance. In the field of chronic pain, attentional biases towards pain-related information have been commonly found. Pain is inexorably connected with emotion however, and a transdiagnostic approach elucidating similar mechanisms underlying pain and mood disorders has been advocated. One such mechanism may be repetitive thinking on negative themes, including worry and rumination. Attentional biases for threatening (e.g., angry faces) and negative (e.g., sad faces) information have been observed in anxious and depressed populations, although to date it has not been fully established whether biases for such information are heightened in individuals with chronic pain relative to healthy individuals. In this study, attentional biases for angry, sad and also happy facial expressions, at 500 and 1250 ms presentation times, were assessed via visual-probe task in chronic daily headache (n = 20) and healthy control (n = 26) groups. Results showed participants to demonstrate significant bias towards angry and sad expressions at 500 and 1250 ms, and happy expressions at 1250 ms. No significant differences in attentional bias were found between chronic daily headache and healthy control groups. These results suggest that attentional biases towards interpersonal threat are not specifically heightened in individuals with chronic daily headache. While similar mechanisms such as rumination may underlie biases in different disorders, this does not translate to heightened biases for the same specific content.

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ORCID for Christina Liossi: orcid.org/0000-0003-0627-6377

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