Hypervigilance to pain as consequence of learning, threat and individual predispositions

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Hypervigilance to pain, a rigid and habitual focus of attention on pain, has been found in both healthy individuals as well as patients with chronic pain, for which it is considered a critical predisposition. Anxious individuals are supposed to present more often with this attentional style. Women are presumably more likely to be hypervigilant than men. What are the situational triggers? The threat of physical harm is one suggested situational trigger of hypervigilance. It remains to be shown under what circumstances hypervigilance can become established, and whether hypervigilance is malleable or extinguishable. The learning of this attentional style could be accomplished by both classical and operant conditioning. This programme of experimental research is set up to test these hypotheses. Attention on pain-related stimuli (pain faces) is experimentally assessed with primary-task attention paradigms (attentional shift paradigm, visual dot-probe task) and by visually evoked brain potentials. Electrical stimuli are used for the induction of physical threat (its presence being assessed by sympathetic skin responses) in non-contingent and contingent fashions to allow for the study of classical and operant learning compared to baseline. Individual differences due to anxiety and sex in the activation and learning of hypervigilance are also under investigation. Several systematic studies with painfree subjects and pilot studies with patients suffering from non-malignant chronic pain are planned. The German-British collaboration is a unique collaboration of pain researchers who are engaged in clinically relevant research, from theoretically strong, and methodologically diverse (psychological, physiological) backgrounds in psychological science.