Abstract:

Fear of pain plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain. Fear of pain appears to have a key role in early stage of attention processing towards pain-related information across different types of stimuli and groups. Considerable evidence indicates associated attention biases reflect hypervigilance that may contribute to perpetuating the focus on pain and interfere with the capacity to attend to non-painful experiences. Modifying attention biases related to fear of pain has the potential to improve pain experience. Future research should use tasks with more ecological validity to investigate information- processing related to fear of pain and its neural substrates. In addition, more research is needed to explore how effective different attention modification strategies are in reducing distress and disability among chronic pain patients.