The role of threat-expectancy in acute pain: effects on attentional bias, coping strategy effectiveness and response to pain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aims of this study were threefold. Firstly, to investigate the effect of increasing threat-expectancy on attentional biases towards pain-related words. Secondly, to determine the interaction between threat-expectancy and the effectiveness of two coping strategies on pain threshold and tolerance. Thirdly, to investigate the relationship between fear of pain and the experimental manipulations. One hundred undergraduate psychology students were randomly assigned to receive either threat-increasing or reassuring information about the cold pressor task. After reading the information, all participants completed the dot-probe task for four categories of pain-related words. Following the dot-probe task, participants were randomly allocated to one of two coping strategy conditions (focusing on affective vs sensory aspects of pain). Participants then completed the cold pressor task while engaging in the relevant coping strategy. There was a significant effect of threat on bias towards affective vs sensory pain words. Participants in the threat condition showed a stronger bias towards affective pain words. In contrast, the no-threat condition displayed a stronger bias towards sensory pain words. Significant interaction effects were observed between threat and coping strategy for threshold and tolerance. These results indicated that focusing on sensory pain sensations was helpful in the absence of threat, however, in the presence of threat was relatively unhelpful in comparison to focusing on the affective components of pain. The present results provide support for the fear-avoidance model of pain [Vlaeyen JWS, Linton SJ. Fear-avoidance and its consequences in chronic musculoskeletal pain: a state of the art. Pain 2000;85:317-332] and confirm the importance of threat-expectancy in hypervigilance towards pain and fear avoidance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.021 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".