Time-course of attentional bias for pain-related cues in chronic daily headache sufferers

Abstract This study investigated attentional biases for linguistic pain-related stimuli in individuals suffering from chronic headaches and healthy controls. Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe (also reported as dot probe in previous investigations) task which presented pain-related (sensory and affective) and neutral words at two exposure duration conditions, 500 and 1250 ms. The results indicated that individuals suffering from chronic headaches showed a significantly greater attentional bias at 1250 ms compared to the controls, which indicates a bias in maintained attention to pain cues in this group. No significant differences between groups were found in attentional bias scores at the shorter stimulus duration of 500 ms, which instead correlated significantly with trait anxiety. Results are discussed in relation to research into pain-related and anxiety-related biases in initial orienting and maintained attention.