Stefaan Van Damme

..Implications of these findings for theories of hypervigilance and attentional management of pain are discussed...

..This study has implications for our understanding of disability, and points to the need to consider avoidance behavior within a broad context of multiple, often competing, goals...

..In order to identify the attentional components involved in the selection of pain signals over competing demands, we used an emotional modification of an exogenous cueing task...

..Our findings suggest that treatment approaches using attention techniques should not focus on preventing patients to shift their attention to the pain but rather on diminishing the threat value and learning to disengage from their pain...

..The aim of this study was to investigate whether acceptance is also associated with better well-being in patients suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS)...

..More particularly, it seems that interruption by pain is not absolute and that pain prioritizes the processing of other perceptual information that it spatially related to the pain...

..These findings are discussed in terms of the role that attention and arousal play in the dominance of vision over audition...

..These results demonstrate that the processing of tactile information from the body part closest to the threatening stimulus is prioritized over tactile information from elsewhere on the body...

..Engagement of attention was not affected by threat, as threat cues did not facilitate the processing of targets in valid trials. The findings are discussed in light of the strengths and limitations of spatial cueing tasks...

..This motivational perspective offers a powerful framework to explain inter- and intra-individual differences in the deployment of attention to pain-related information...

..Methodological implications for measuring attentional bias in young age groups are discussed...

..This biased attention largely disappeared during extinction. During the reinstatement phase attentional bias to threat signals re-emerged in the reinstatement group, but not in the control group...

..Theoretical and clinical implications of these findings are discussed...

..Our findings provide further evidence that pain cues demand attention, particularly resulting in impaired disengagement...

..It may be concluded that the analgesic effect of distraction is at least partly the result of the spatial location of the distracting information...

..These experiments suggest that subliminal aversive conditioning produces small but significant effects, which may be modulated by expectancy awareness...

..We conclude that increasing the motivational relevance of the distraction task may increase the effects of distraction, especially for those who catastrophize about pain...

..Results showed that in the pain-control group, attention was more prioritized towards the Conditioned Stimulus than in the comparison group. The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed...

..Of further importance was the finding that the experimental group also attended to the location that was predictive of the CS+, even when no CS+ was presented. Findings are discussed in terms the effects of predictability on anxiety...

..The results provide evidence for motivational accounts of attention, which state that the automatic allocation of attention is guided by the current goals of a person...

..The search on congruent trials was affected by set size (90 ms/item), but to a lesser extent than on baseline trials (105 ms/item). We conclude that threat prioritizes, but does not capture attention...

..Theoretical implications and further research directions are discussed...

..Neuroticism is best conceived of as a vulnerability factor; it lowers the threshold at which pain is perceived as threatening, and at which catastrophic thoughts about pain emerge...

..Our results provide further evidence that catastrophic thinking enhances the attentional demand of pain, particularly resulting in difficulty disengaging from pain. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed...

..These data provide evidence for differential patterns of anxiety-related biases in attentive processing of threat at early versus later stages of information processing...

..The effect was independent of the valence of the pictures and not gender-specific. The findings support the idea that arousal affects the allocation of attention...

..However, the performance on the distraction task improved with better inhibition abilities, indicating that inhibition abilities might be important in focussing on a task despite the pain...

..This adapted paradigm may offer unique possibilities to investigate how pain interferes with task performance while people repeat and switch between multiple tasks in a multitask environment...

..For the 1250 ms condition, the HTA individuals attended away from high and mild threat pictures. The observed pattern of differential attention to threatening pictures may explain the persistence of fear in HTA individuals...

..These findings suggest that conditioning with full and restricted CA can lead to qualitatively different effects on attention...

..On examination it appeared that catastrophic thinking about pain may operate by a protection of the belief that the cue for pain is a valid one, despite experience to the contrary...

..These findings suggest that caution is required in using distraction as a pain control strategy when the threat value is high, because fearful appraisal of pain is associated with less engagement in distraction tasks...

..Psychol Aging 1990;5:58-67] and possible mechanisms for perseverance with ineffective solutions...

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..We propose to extend the FA model by adopting a motivational perspective on chronic pain and disability...

..Repeated attempts at solving pain may increase the need for analgesic medication, despite obvious costs. This mechanism might contribute to the problem of medication-overuse headache...

..Response latencies showed that threatening cues captured and held attention. These results support recent views on attention to threat, proposing that imminent threat captures attention in everyone...

..The use of interventions that diminish attentional bias may therefore be helpful to reduce daily disability and the level of distraction from current tasks despite the presence of pain in chronic pain patients...

..We discuss the value of this experimental paradigm for investigating excessive attentional focus or hypervigilance to particular regions of the body in various clinical populations...

..Certainly those patients for whom there is no definite or sound cure to pain and who increasingly experience emotional and physical problems due to pain might benefit from paramedical help by psychologists and/or physiotherapists...

..J Consult Clin Psychol, 69:1026-1036, 2001) assesses three ways of cognitively evaluating the stressful and aversive character of a chronic illness: helplessness, acceptance, and perceived benefits...

..The current operational use may unduly lead to a "psychologisation" of physical complaints...

..None of the individual difference variables affected the magnitude of the attentional bias. Implications of current findings and future directions are discussed...

..Current findings suggest that distraction should not be used as a 'one size fits all' method to control pain, but only under more specific conditions...

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..Within the groups, neither catastrophic thinking nor fear predicted the magnitude of the performance deterioration...