Attentional Bias Toward Pictorial Representations of Pain in Individuals With Chronic Headache

Objectives: This study investigated attentional biases for pictorial headache-related stimuli in individuals with chronic headache and healthy controls. Methods: Attentional bias was assessed using a visual probe task that presented headache-related images and neutral images at 2 exposure duration conditions, 500 and 1250 ms. Results: The results indicated that individuals with chronic daily headache showed a significantly greater overall attentional bias across presentation times toward headache-related stimuli compared with the controls, which indicates a bias in both initial orienting and maintained attention to pain cues in this group. Discussion: It is concluded that both hypervigilance and sustained processing are critical factors for the maintenance of chronic pain.