A woman showing chikungunya-like fever symptoms is helped by a doctor
A woman showing chikungunya-like fever symptoms is helped by a doctor and a man at a health centre in Villa San Francisco on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa October 2, 2014. Honduras' Minister of Social Development Lisandro Rosales said on Thursday there are already more than 400 people with possible symptoms of the painful mosquito-borne viral disease chikungunya in Villa San Francisco, and urged residents to stay inside the village, according to local media. REUTERS/Jorge Cabrera (HONDURAS - Tags: HEALTH SOCIETY POLITICS) Reuters

A new research, "More than meets the eye: visual attention biases in individuals reporting chronic pain," conducted by the York University has found that people suffering from chronic pain pay more attention to words that are pain-related. The study found by the use of state-of-the-art eye-tracking technology that those suffering from pain draw more attention to words such as ache, agony, pain, hurt and distress.

Lead author of the study, Samantha Fashler stated that not only do they pay attention to pain related words but they pay attention to them more frequently and for longer periods on time. Whereas those not suffering from pain do not relate to them or do not pay that amount of attention on pain-related words. Fashler is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Health. She explains that the eye movements of a person can reveal what he is paying attention to. And this knowledge is helpful in understanding who develops chronic pain.

This study has used an eye tracker which was not used in previous studies. The main characteristic of it is that it measures reaction time, and it is much more efficient than the previously used dot-probe task. Moreover, it helps understand how the attention to pain-related words in a person who is suffering from chronic pain affects the presence of pain.

Professor Joel Katz, Canada Research Chair in Health Psychology, the co-author of the study, stated that this knowledge of how attentive chronic pain sufferers are to pain-related words, changes their experience of pain. Katz stated that this is the first step in understanding how it affects them, whether it makes the pain more intense or it makes them more attentive to the pain.

For the study, 51 persons suffering from chronic pain were taken, and 62 who were not suffering. Their eye movements were tracked as they were given neutral and sensory pain-related words. The eye tracking technology precisely indicated the time they attended to each word or the attention span on each word. "The eye-tracking technology captured eye gaze patterns with millimetre precision," said Fashler. The frequency and the time span for which they concentrated on the words were measured.

The study is published in the Journal of Pain Research.