Effects of context and individual predispositions on hypervigilance to pain-cues: an ERP study.

Background: Hypervigilance to pain is the automatic prioritization of pain-related compared with other stimuli. The processing of threat information is influenced by negative contexts. Therefore, we intended to explore such context effects on hypervigilance to pain-cues, taking individual differences in self-reported vigilance to pain into consideration.

Vigilance for pain-related faces in a primary task paradigm: an ERP study.

Background: Pain-related stimuli are supposed to be automatically prioritized over other stimuli. This prioritization has often been tested using primary task paradigms in which pain information is irrelevant for completing the explicitly posed task. Task-irrelevant stimuli are only processed if they are very salient, and pain-related stimuli are assumed to be salient enough.

Interrelation of self-report, behavioural and electrophysiological measures assessing pain-related information processing.

Introduction: A number of variables reflecting attentional and emotional mechanisms of processing pain-related information have recently attracted interest, ie, fear of pain, pain catastrophizing, hypervigilance and attentional bias to pain. These variables can be assessed by explicit measures based on conscious self-report, or by implicit measures assessing mainly preconscious stages of information processing such as behavioural or electrophysiological tests. Convergent validity within implicit measures was assumed to be high, as was the discriminant validity between implicit and explicit measures.