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

对疼痛的高度警惕是对疼痛的一种刻板和习惯性的关注焦点，在健康人和慢性疼痛患者中都发现了这一点，对慢性疼痛来说，这被认为是一种关键的易感性。焦虑的人应该更经常地表现出这种专注的风格。据推测，女性比男性更有可能高度警惕。情景触发因素是什么？身体伤害的威胁被认为是高度警惕的情景触发因素之一。在什么情况下可以建立起高度警惕，以及高度警惕是可延展的还是可消除的，这还有待证明。这种注意方式的学习可以通过经典条件反射和操作条件反射来完成。这个实验研究方案就是为了检验这些假说而设立的。对疼痛相关刺激(疼痛面孔)的注意使用主要任务注意范式(注意转移范式、视觉圆点探测任务)和视觉诱发的脑电位进行实验评估。电刺激用于以非偶然性和偶然性方式诱导身体威胁(其存在通过交感皮肤反应来评估)，以便与基线相比研究经典学习和操作性学习。由于焦虑和性别在激活和学习超警觉方面的个体差异也在调查中。计划对无痛受试者进行几项系统研究，并对患有非恶性慢性疼痛的患者进行试点研究。德国和英国的合作是从事临床相关研究的疼痛研究人员的独特合作，他们拥有强大的理论和不同的(心理、生理)心理学方法背景。

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.