The ability to habituate to pain may be adaptive, and it may enable us to pursue valuable goals despite the pain. In this study, we experimentally investigated this idea using the primary task paradigm in which participants had to identify the color of a circle (blue or yellow) as quickly as possible while ignoring painful or tactile distractors that are presented on some of the trials. In the first experiment, we were interested whether the attentional interference effect because of the presentation of the distractors and its habituation would differ between painful and tactile distractor stimuli. In the second experiment, we investigated dishabituation (ie, the phenomenon that the introduction of a different stimulus results in an increase of the decremented response to the original stimulus). We expected habituation of the attentional interference to occur both in the tactile and the painful distractor condition, but to be less complete in the painful condition. Moreover, we hypothesized that the dishabituation would be stronger for the painful than for the tactile distractors. We did find evidence for an interference effect because of the presence of distractors. We also found habituation of attentional interference. However, the interference and its habituation were no different for tactile and painful distractors. Moreover, we did not find evidence for dishabituation. These are the first studies of their kind. Implications and guidelines for future research are formulated.

习惯疼痛的能力可能是适应性的，它可能使我们能够在疼痛的情况下追求有价值的目标。在这项研究中，我们使用主要任务范例对这个想法进行了实验研究，其中参与者必须尽快识别圆圈的颜色（蓝色或黄色），同时忽略一些试验中出现的疼痛或触觉干扰。在第一个实验中，我们感兴趣的是由于干扰物的呈现及其习惯而引起的注意力干扰效应在疼痛和触觉干扰物刺激之间是否会有所不同。在第二个实验中，我们研究了去习惯现象（即引入不同刺激导致对原始刺激的递减反应增加的现象）。我们预计注意力干扰的习惯化会在触觉和痛苦的分心条件下发生，但在痛苦的条件下不太完全。此外，我们假设，疼痛者的去习惯作用比触觉干扰物的去习惯作用更强。我们确实发现了由于干扰物的存在而产生干扰效应的证据。我们还发现注意力干扰的习惯化。然而，对于触觉和痛苦的干扰物来说，干扰及其习惯并没有什么不同。此外，我们没有发现去习惯的证据。这些是同类研究中的首次。制定了对未来研究的影响和指南。