AB1225-HPR Attentional Processing Evaluation in Fibromyalgia Using an Emotional Stroop Task

BackgroundDistinct experimental studies have been conducted in persons with chronic pain in order to explore possible attentional bias towards pain related stimuli. One of the most applied experimental paradigms, in this context, is the emotional stroop task in which words with different emotional content are presented to the subjects (Andersson & Haldrup, 2003). This task appears as a relevant tool to investigate the role of emotional mechanisms in the modulation of attentional resources in chronic pain conditions (Asmundson, Wright & Hadjistavropoulos, 2005).ObjectivesExplore the possible modulation of attentional resources and executive control processes by pain related stimuli in people with Fibromyalgia (FM).MethodsAn emotional stroop paradigm was presented to 22 women diagnosed with Fibromyalgia (FM; M =53.64 years, SD =8.92) and 21 controls (M =46.95 years, SD =9.74). Participants were asked to point out the color of different words that were distributed in alternate blocks of pain related words or neutral words. Pain related stimuli were extracted from the McGill Pain Questionnaire. Neutral words were selected from a dictionary taking “Diccionario de frecuencias de las unidades linguísticas del Castellano” (Alameda & Cuetos, 1995) into consideration psycholinguist similarities with the pain selected words. These stimuli were then tested and validated in another group of participants with FM.ResultsFrom the mixed design ANOVA applied the results showed significant differences in the group (F[1,41]=4.482, p=0.040). The posthoc analysis yielded significant differences between groups (p