Understanding the attentional bias of chronic pain patients

Intervention Group: Attentional training using the Dot Probe computer task (4 sessions over 4 weeks, 30 minute task), Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) (8 individual, 1 hr sessions over 8 weeks). All participants will receive CBT and it will involve education about chronic pain, activity pacing, relaxation training, goal setting, problem solving and cognitive restructuring. CBT will have a manual based approach. The dot probe task is a non-invasive computer task. On each trial participants will be presented a target word and a neutral word in either the upper or lower half of the computer screen. This is then followed by a visual probe (either a ‘p’ or a ‘q’) presented in the location of one of the previously presented words. The task is to discriminate the probe’s identity as accurately and quickly as possible, by pressing one of two buttons labelled with a ‘p’ and ‘q’. Half of the participants will be randomly allocated to receive the experimental task (ie. attentional re-training which is a biased version of this task, whereby the visual probe always follows the neutral word, in an attempt to retrain participants attention). The other half of the participants will receive a placebo task (ie. an unbiased/randomised version of the task). The control group will receive a placebo computer task and they will also receive CBT. The experimental and placebo computer tasks will be compared to assess whether the experimental task improves the effectiveness of CBT.