The interactions between pain-related cognitive biases for somatosensory and visual information

Pain-related biases in attention and interpretation are predicted to contribute to the development and maintenance of chronic pain. After a general introduction, Chapter 1 of this thesis gives an overview of relevant theory. Chapter 2 provides a literature review of attention and interpretation biases to visual pain-related information and to somatosensory information, which concludes that investigation into the interaction between these types of bias could further understanding of cognitive biases in chronic pain. In Chapter 3, the methods used to investigate these research questions in the current programme of research are discussed and evaluated. Chapter 4 presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of AB to somatosensory stimuli in individuals with chronic pain. Chapter 5 and Chapter 6 report two experimental studies which investigated the connections between cognitive biases for pain-related information (words and written scenarios) and cognitive biases for somatosensory stimuli in healthy participants. Chapter 5 reports an investigation into the association between AB to the location of experimentally-induced pain and AB to pain-related words. Chapter 6 reports an experiment that tested whether pain-related IBM with written scenarios could alter interpretation of ambiguous thermal sensations. The final experimental study of the current research, reported in Chapter 7, investigated whether IBM could modify interpretation of painful sensations for individuals with chronic pain, while also considering the mechanisms of this effect. In Chapter 8, this thesis concludes with a discussion of the key findings and methodological contributions of the current programme of research, and a novel theoretical model is proposed.