BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Contingency learning, i.e. learning that a cue predicts the presence (or absence) of an event, is central to the formation of beliefs regarding painfulness of body postures. Such beliefs may spread to safe cues due to compromised learning (e.g., excessive generalization, impaired safety learning), prompting avoidance and leading to disability. Despite its importance, compromised learning about low back pain is underinvestigated. We propose a low back pain scenario contingency learning task for the investigation of back pain-related learning. METHODS Sixty healthy participants viewed pictures of an avatar in various back postures, and for each posture gave pain-expectancy judgments and viewed the verbal outcome (pain/no pain) for a fictive back pain patient. During acquisition, one posture was followed by pain (conditioned stimulus; CS+), whereas another was not (CS-). During generalization, unreinforced novel intermediate back postures (generalization stimuli; GSs) were tested. During extinction, only the CSs were presented, not followed by pain. During generalization of extinction, only the GSs were presented, not followed by pain. RESULTS Participants expected pain more for the CS + than the CS- (differential acquisition) and generalized their pain-expectancy to the GS most similar to the CS+ (generalization). During extinction, pain-expectancy for the CS + decreased and generalized to the GS most similar to the CS+ (generalization of extinction). LIMITATIONS Future research should investigate generalizability of findings to clinical samples and consider the role of pre-existing pain threat beliefs. CONCLUSIONS This task is an easily applicable, non-invasive way to investigate the formation of back pain-related threat beliefs.

中文翻译：

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那会痛吗？评估下背部姿势的疼痛预期判断的应急学习任务。

背景和目标 偶然性学习，即学习提示预测事件的存在（或不存在），是形成关于身体姿势疼痛的信念的核心。由于学习受损（例如，过度概括、安全学习受损），这种信念可能会传播到安全线索，促使回避并导致残疾。尽管它很重要，但有关腰痛的学习受到损害的研究尚未得到充分研究。我们提出了一个腰痛情景应急学习任务，用于调查与腰痛相关的学习。方法 60 名健康参与者以各种背部姿势观看化身的图片，并对每种姿势进行疼痛预期判断，并查看虚构的背部疼痛患者的口头结果（疼痛/无疼痛）。在收购过程中，一种姿势伴随着疼痛（条件刺激；CS+），而另一种则没有（CS-）。在泛化过程中，测试了未经强化的新型中间背部姿势（泛化刺激；GS）。在灭绝过程中，只出现了 CS，之后没有疼痛。在灭绝的泛化过程中，只有 GS 出现，之后没有疼痛。结果 参与者对 CS + 的疼痛预期高于 CS-（差异获取），并将他们的疼痛预期推广到与 CS+（泛化）最相似的 GS。在灭绝期间，CS + 的疼痛预期降低并推广到与 CS + 最相似的 GS（灭绝推广）。局限性 未来的研究应该调查研究结果对临床样本的普遍性，并考虑预先存在的疼痛威胁信念的作用。