Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Pediatric chronic pain is a highly prevalent condition and is associated with significant distress, functional impairment, and high psychiatric comorbidity. Theoretical models of chronic pain and anxiety suggest attention bias as one modifiable mechanism underlying the development and maintenance of both conditions. To date, the results of research examining attentional biases in pain have yielded mixed results. Novel eye-tracking technology offers advantages in measuring sustained attention over time. This is the first study to use eye-tracking to examine attention biases to pain-related information in a sample of youth with chronic pain. Youth with chronic pain were recruited from the Vi Riddell Pain Outpatient Clinics at the Alberta Children's Hospital. Participants attended a lab visit at the Alberta Children's Pain Research Laboratory and completed an eye-tracking task as part of a larger study on pain and mental health. Participants were asked to view images of other children depicting pain expressions of varying severity (low, moderate, high) and neutral facial expressions while their eye gaze was recorded. Total gaze duration assessed sustained attention over time and time to first fixation assessed early attentional capture. Results revealed that youth with chronic pain exhibited significantly higher gaze duration for pain faces as compared to neutral faces, indicative of an attentional bias towards pain-related information. Moreover, youth demonstrated the strongest attentional bias towards the high pain faces. In addition, participants' time to first fixation was significantly shorter for pain faces, indicative of hypervigilance. These preliminary results indicate a significant attentional bias towards pain-related information (as compared to neutral information). Future longitudinal research will examine whether the attention biases underlie the co-occurrence of anxiety and pain over time.