Attentional biases to pain and social threat in children with recurrent abdominal pain.

Objectives: To test whether children with recurrent abdominal pain (RAP) exhibit subliminal (nonconscious) and supraliminal (conscious) attentional biases to pain-related words, and to determine correlates of these biases. Previous research indicates that individuals attend to disorder-relevant threat words, and in this study, attentional biases to disorder-relevant threat (pain), alternative threat (social threat), and neutral words were compared.

Methods: Participants were 59 children with RAP who completed a computer-based attentional bias task.