Abstract/Summary

Evidence suggests that attention to pain is a product of both incoming sensory signals and cognitive evaluation of a stimulus. Intrinsic attention to pain (IAP) is a measure that captures an individual's natural tendency to attend to a painful stimulus and may be important in understanding why pain disrupts cognitive functioning in some individuals more than others. In this study, we explored the extent to which IAP was associated with the modulation of incoming sensory signals characteristic of a pronociceptive phenotype: temporal summation (TS) and conditioned pain modulation (CPM). 44 healthy participants (23 female; M =23.57, S.D.=5.50) were assessed on IAP, TS and CPM. We found that IAP was positively correlated with TS and CPM. A regression model showed that TS and CPM explained 39% of the variance in IAP scores. Both mechanisms seem to contribute independently to the propensity to attend to pain. These findings highlight that modulatory mechanisms at the spinal/supraspinal level exert a strong influence on an individual's ability to disengage from pain. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. on behalf of The International Association for the Study of Pain.]