Personalized pain words and Stroop interference in chronic pain patients

Attentional bias in patients with chronic pain was investigated using the emotional Stroop task with personalized pain words. A group of 20 chronic pain patients with 20 matched controls participated in the experiment. Before administration of the emotional Stroop patients were asked to select the five best descriptors of their pain from a list of 19 sensory pain descriptors. These words were later used in the computerized Stroop test. Also included in the Stroop task were threat words and color words with corresponding control conditions. Apart from the emotional Stroop, measures of pain related distress, anxiety, and depression symptoms were included. Results showed a weak Stroop interference effect with slower reaction times to pain words in the patient group, but they did not differ significantly from the controls. Both groups were slower on the threat words and displayed the classical Stroop interference effect for color words. The overall pattern of results are in line with previous Stroop studies on pain patients showing weak support for the attentional bias hypothesis.