Don’t get boxed in: Pathways to attenuate the spreading of pain-related avoidance behavior

Protective responses such as avoidance of pain-associated movements and activities are highly adaptive in acute pain as they prevent further injury. However, avoidance beyond healing time prevents learning that movements/activities are actually safe, potentially contributing to the development of chronic pain disability. Using an operant avoidance paradigm, a first goal of the current project is to demonstrate spreading (i.e., generalization) of pain-related avoidance behavior experimentally in healthy, pain-free participants, as well as increased generalization in chronic pain patients (compared to healthy, pain-free controls). Furthermore, this project focuses on perception (i.e., increasing proprioceptive accuracy) and emotion (i.e., increasing positive affect) to potentially counteract such generalization experimentally. As generalization is negatively related to the degree to which one stimulus can be differentiated from another, training perceptual accuracy may reduce generalization. When it comes to movements, proprioceptive information is key: the perception of motion and position of the body or body segments in space. To investigate the potential role of proprioception in generalization of pain-related avoidance of movements, we will first develop a measure to quantify proprioceptive function. Next, we will test the association between proprioceptive function and generalization, to then potentially train the former to reduce the latter. Additionally, we will investigate the diagnostic validity of our newly developed measure in chronic pain patients. Furthermore, we will investigate the effect of experimentally inducing positive affect on generalization of pain-related avoidance. To this end, we will employ a positive psychology intervention (i.e., the Best Possible Self exercise), which has been shown to reduce generalization of pain-related fear in healthy, pain-free participants.

Jaar van publicatie:2022

Toegankelijkheid:Open