Studies investigating attentional biases towards pain information vary widely in both design and results. The aim of this meta-analysis was to determine the degree to which attentional biases towards pain occur when measured with the dot-probe task. A total of 2168 references were screened, resulting in a final sample of 4466 participants from 52 articles. Participants were grouped according to pain experience: chronic pain, acute pain, anticipating experimental/procedural pain, social concern for pain, or healthy people. In general, results revealed a significant, but small bias towards pain words (d = 0.136), and pain pictures (d = 0.110) in chronic pain patients, but not in those with acute pain, those anticipating pain, or healthy people. Follow-up analyses revealed an attentional bias towards sensory pain words in the chronic pain group (d = 0.198), and the acute pain group (d = 0.303), but not other groups. In contrast, attentional biases towards affective pain stimuli were not significant for any pain groups. This meta-analysis found support for attentional biases towards sensory pain stimuli in patients with chronic pain in comparison to healthy individuals across a range of common parameters. Future researchers need to consider task design when seeking to optimally measure pain-relevant attentional biases.

中文翻译：

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对疼痛相关信息的注意偏见：点探针研究的荟萃分析

有关注意力偏向于疼痛信息的研究在设计和结果上差异很大。这项荟萃分析的目的是确定使用点探针任务进行测量时注意力偏向疼痛的程度。总共筛选了2168篇参考文献，最终从52篇文章中抽取了4466名参与者作为样本。根据疼痛经历将参与者分组：慢性疼痛，急性疼痛，预期的实验/程序性疼痛，社会对疼痛的关注或健康的人。总的来说，结果表明，对痛苦的话（d  = 0.136）和痛苦的图片（d  =0.110）在慢性疼痛患者中，而在急性疼痛，预期疼痛或健康人群中则不然。后续分析显示，在慢性疼痛组（d  = 0.198）和急性疼痛组（d  = 0.303）中，对感觉疼痛单词的注意力偏向，而其他组则没有。相反，对于任何疼痛组，对情感性疼痛刺激的注意偏见均不显着。这项荟萃分析发现，与在一系列常见参数范围内的健康个体相比，慢性疼痛患者对感觉疼痛刺激的注意偏见得到了支持。未来的研究人员在寻求最佳衡量与疼痛相关的注意偏见时，需要考虑任务设计。