summary: Avoidance of past pain-related activities may lead to avoidance of seemingly pain-free related activities. This avoidance can generalize to safe activities, leading to unnecessary abstinence from worthwhile activities.
A study conducted in healthy individuals revealed that this generalization extends to both physically similar and conceptually related tasks.
The results of this study highlight the need for a better understanding of pain avoidance to improve outcomes for people with chronic pain.
Important facts:
- This study reveals that pain avoidance can be generalized to conceptually related activities that can be performed without pain.
- This study shows that generalized avoidance may be based on the conceptual similarities that individuals assign to tasks.
- Psychological factors are better predictors of chronic pain than the severity of physical injury, highlighting the need to further explore the generalization of pain avoidance.
sauce: APS
Chronic pain limits our lives so much that the fear that certain activities will lead to more pain and suffering drives us to reach our full professional potential, enjoy our hobbies and activities. They can’t even participate in meaningful life events with friends and family. Avoiding pain-related experiences can be an adaptive behavior.
However, as Eveliina Grogan, Peixin Liu and Ann Meulders (Maastricht University) demonstrate in a recent paper, psychological science According to the article, when you learn to avoid one activity that has caused you pain in the past, you will also avoid conceptually related activities that you might be able to complete without pain.
“When avoidance generalizes to such safe travels and activities, it can become a problem,” Grogan said in an interview.
“For example, unnecessary avoidance can sacrifice other important activities, such as playing with children, and reduced activity levels can ultimately lead to disability.”
This generalization can be extended not only to physically similar tasks (e.g. mopping to vacuuming) but also across categories of conceptually related activities such as cleaning and sports.
Grogan, Liu, and Mölders investigated how systemic avoidance occurs in healthy people through a study of 40 people without chronic pain.
To see how painful the shock was, each participant wore two sets of electrodes that delivered progressively stronger electric shocks. When the participant rated the pain severity as 8 out of 10 on her scale (described as “substantial pain and requires some effort to endure”), the shock ceased and the hands-on phase of the experiment began. started.
During this phase, participants use a joystick to move tools such as wheelbarrows and mops toward appropriate items such as grass piles and puddles to complete digital ‘gardening’ and ‘cleaning’ tasks. was instructed to , across the computer screen.
In the first eight hands-on trials, participants were allowed to choose one of two routes to the item. One is a direct and efficient route that allows him to complete the task with one movement of the joystick, and the other is a longer and less efficient route that requires him to move the joystick. Press her twice with the tool on the item.
However, in subsequent mastery trials, participants were asked to follow the direct route whenever they completed a single category of task (mopping or vacuuming for cleaning or using a rake or wheelbarrow for gardening). There was an 80% chance of getting a painful shock while using it.
But it didn’t shock me when I was taking the indirect route or completing tasks in the other category (the “safe” category). Before each experiment, participants reported how painful they expected each route to be, and their fear of using them, using a scale of 0 to 100.
After participants had the opportunity to learn which tasks were more likely to cause pain, they completed a generalization phase that combined eight additional gardening and cleaning tasks and the same measures of expected pain and fear. Did.
Although mopping/vacuum using the direct route or working with the raking/barrow continued to cause painful shock, participants performed new tasks in both categories without zapping on either route. I was able to complete it.
By the end of the acquisition phase, participants were more than five times more likely to choose the longer, pain-free route to complete tasks that previously shocked them with the direct route.
Participants also reported higher pain expectations and fears associated with the direct route before completing these tasks, and these higher pain expectations and fears, albeit to a lesser extent, were associated with this It even spread to tasks that never caused pain until now.
This suggests that participants learned to fear experiencing pain in a direct route during a particular task, but were not entirely sure whether the ‘safe’ task was really safe. suggests that, Grogan et al.
By the end of the experiment, avoidance of previously painful behaviors was significantly reduced compared to others in the same category, despite experiencing no pain when completing these tasks using the direct route. I generalized it to tasks as well.
Overall, participants were 1.8 times more likely to take the indirect route when completing new tasks in the same category as previously painful tasks. I was. For example, cleaning activities such as washing the dishes and dusting, if you have so far been distressed by choosing the direct path of mopping or vacuuming. — than when running new tasks from safe categories.
Additionally, participants reported fearing and expecting more pain from the direct route during novel tasks in the pain-related category than in the safe category.
They also reported higher fear and pain expectations associated with choosing the direct route during new tasks from the safe category than during familiar and safe tasks.
Previous research by Grogan and colleagues supports the view that people generalize pain expectations across activity categories according to perceptual similarity, but this study suggests that generalized Grogan explained in an interview, suggesting that avoidance may be based on conceptual similarities that individuals assign to tasks.
This is a distinction between perceptually linking vacuuming and mopping because they involve similar physical movements, and conceptually linking mopping, dishwashing, and dusting because they relate to the same category of cleaning. Equivalent to
In another interview, Melders showed that psychological factors, rather than physical factors such as the severity of an injury, were the best predictors of which patients would experience chronic pain. said that a better understanding of how pain avoidance generalizes could help improve treatment. result.
“Fears and avoidance behaviors can spread in unique ways, and it’s really important to tap into those semantic networks and find the specific categories people have if you want to treat them,” Mölders said. added.
Grogan and Mölders said future research is needed to investigate how these findings apply to patients with chronic pain, noting that patients with chronic pain experience pain avoidance more extensively than healthy individuals. He said he thought it would be common.
About this pain and psychology research news
author: Leah Thayer
sauce: APS
contact: Leah Thayer – APS
image: Image credited to Neuroscience News
Original research: open access.
“Generalization of costly pain-related avoidance based on real-world categorical knowledgeBy Evelina Grogan et al. psychological science
overview
Generalization of costly pain-related avoidance based on real-world categorical knowledge
Avoiding activities that pose a physical threat is adaptive. However, when avoidance extends to safe activities, it can lead to functional impairment in people with chronic pain.
We conducted a study in 40 pain-free individuals (30 women, mean age = 25 years, college students in Maastricht, the Netherlands and the general public), based on real categorical knowledge, to determine whether costly pain-related avoidance We investigated whether there is generalization from one activity to another. . In the computer task, the participant moved a joystick to complete her two categories of activities (gardening and cleaning).
During avoidance category activities, you can avoid pain at the expense of work efficiency by deviating from painful joystick short movements. Activities from the safe category have never been painful. We subsequently tested generalization of avoidance to novel pain-free activities from both categories.
Participants generalized avoidance to novel activities from the avoidance category, despite the novel activity not being associated with pain and having an avoidance cost, while costly (pain-related) avoidance generalization from one activity to another based on knowledge of reach and produce harmful consequences.
