Relationships among Chronic Pain, Hypervigilance, and Executive Function

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  • February 26, 2019
Creator
  • Bryen, Chloe
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Abstract
  • This research study explores the effects of a history of chronic pain on current pain perception and executive function. We asked participants to report any chronic pain earlier in life and to indicate the ages at which it occurred. Two measures of executive function were used. The Operation Span (OSPAN) test measured the ability to move numerical and verbal information in and out of working memory, while the Stroop task tested the ability to suppress salient but irrelevant information in the form of color names. We also studied the ability of one pain to modulate another (conditioned pain modulation, CPM), a perceptual analogue of executive function (Yarnitsky, 2015). To measure CPM, we asked subjects to rate pressure stimuli on one arm while the opposite hand was placed either in painfully cold or thermally neutral water, and compared the two sets of ratings. Catastrophizing and hypervigilance were also measured, because these perceptual/cognitive habits can sometimes influence pain. Analyses statistically compared these five measures of central processing in individuals with and without a history of chronic pain and found individuals with a later age of first experience with chronic pain had higher Stroop effect scores, suggesting lessened ability to inhibit information. An independent samples t-test found that people with a history of chronic pain experience less CPM. These findings suggest that central inhibition is negatively impacted by chronic pain. There were also significant positive correlations between measures of hypervigilance and weighted-rod sensation ratings. Future studies should focus on the age of first chronic pain as a factor in executive function and pain modulation.
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  • In Copyright
Note
  • Funding: None
Advisor
  • Hollins, Mark
Degree
  • Bachelor of Arts
Academic concentration
  • Psychology
Honors level
  • Highest Honors
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Graduation year
  • 2017
Language
  • English

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