Highlights
- •Healthy volunteers made choices between incompatible pain-related alternatives.
- •Alternatives differed in their (un)desirable effect on pain and money probability.
- •Choice latency and switching related positively to conflict and decision difficulty.
- •Choice switching related to threat/fear and affect in avoidance-avoidance conflicts.
- •Associations between choice behavior, pain, and affect depend on conflict situation.
Abstract
Individuals in pain often face the choice between avoiding pain and pursuing other
equally valued goals. However, little is known about pain-related choice behavior
and pain perception in goal conflict situations. Seventy-eight healthy volunteers
performed a computerized task requiring repeated choices between incompatible options,
differing in their effect on probability to receive painful stimulation and money.
Depending on group assignment, participants chose between increased pain probability
versus decreased money probability (avoidance-avoidance conflict situation); decreased
pain probability versus increased money probability (approach-approach conflict situation);
or decrease versus increase in both probabilities (double approach/avoidance conflict
situation). During the choice task, participants rated painfulness, unpleasantness,
threat, and fearfulness associated with the painful stimulation and how they felt.
Longer choice latency and more choice switching were associated with higher retrospective
ratings of conflict and of decision difficulty, and more equal importance placed on
pain avoidance and earning money. Groups did not differ in choice behavior, pain stimulus
ratings, or affect. Across groups, longer choice latencies were nonsignificantly associated
with higher pain, unpleasantness, threat, and fearfulness. In the avoidance-avoidance
group, more choice switching was associated with higher pain-related threat and fearfulness,
and with more negative affect. These results of this study suggest that associations
between choice behaviors, pain perception, and affect depend on conflict situation.
Perspective
We present a first experimental demonstration of the relationship between pain-related
choice behaviors, pain, and affect in different goal conflict situations. This experimental
approach allows us to examine these relationships in a controlled fashion. Better
understanding of pain-related goal conflicts and their resolution may lead to more
effective pain treatment.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: September 13, 2014
Accepted:
August 21,
2014
Received in revised form:
August 19,
2014
Received:
June 2,
2014
Footnotes
The presented experimental work was done at the Department of Clinical Psychological Science, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
This work was supported by the NWO Social Sciences Research Council of the Netherlands, Grant No. 453-04-003 and the Odysseus Grant “The Psychology of Pain and Disability Research Program” funded by Research Foundation - Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek–Vlaanderen), Belgium. M.G.S.S. is also supported by a career-building research position at Örebro Universitet, Sweden. K.W. is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bath and is currently funded by the award of a University of Bath Prize Fellowship to the Centre for Pain Research.
Supplementary data accompanying this article are available online at http://www.jpain.org and http://www.sciencedirect.com.
Identification
Copyright
© 2014 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
