Authors: Mark Hollins Sloan Walters
Publish Date: 2016/01/02
Volume: 234, Issue: 6, Pages: 1377-1384
Abstract
Patients with chronic pain conditions such as fibromyalgia often demonstrate hypervigilance—undue alertness for unpleasant or threatening bodily sensations—as well as enhancement of these sensations The generalized hypervigilance hypothesis GHH of Rollman and colleagues asserts that hypervigilance leads to this perceptual amplification However causeandeffect relationships are difficult to establish in studies using a quasiexperimental design In the present study we sought to address this issue by attempting to induce hypervigilance experimentally in one of two groups to which young healthy adults had been randomly assigned Those in the experimental group wrote about the flu and practiced counting their own blinks breaths and heartbeats those in the control group wrote about a neutral topic and counted innocuous lights and sounds Next both groups rated the intensity and unpleasantness of pressure sensations ranging from mild to painful caused by a series of applications of a weighted rod to the forearm The intensity/unpleasantness ratio of these ratings was significantly greater in the experimental group suggesting that induced hypervigilance had caused perceptual amplification that generalized to pressure sensations which had not been part of the experimental manipulation Psychometric measures of anxiety and catastrophizing were equivalent in the two groups indicating that the experimental manipulation operated via attentional rather than emotional changes The results support the GHHThanks are due to Dillon Taylor for help in developing the counting tasks to MC Whatley for assistance in running subjects and to Page Sloan for statistical advice We are also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier version of the manuscript
Keywords: