• Edmund Keogh, Nina Attridge, Joseph Walsh, Jessica Bartlett, Rachel Francis, Janet H Bultitude, and Christopher Eccleston.
• Department of Psychology, University of Bath, UK; Bath Centre for Pain Research, University of Bath, UK. Electronic address: e.m.keogh@bath.ac.uk.
• J Pain. 2021 Dec 1; 22 (12): 1696-1708.

AbstractThis study investigated whether there are gender differences in attention to bodily expressions of pain and core emotions. Three experiments are reported using the attentional dot probe task. Images of men and women displaying bodily expressions, including pain, were presented. The task was used to determine whether participants' attention was drawn towards or away from target expressions. Inconsistent evidence was found for an attentional bias towards body expressions, including pain. While biases were affected by gender, patterns varied across the Experiments. Experiment 1, which had a presentation duration of 500 ms, found a relative bias towards the location of male body expressions compared to female expressions. Experiments 2 and 3 varied stimulus exposure times by including both shorter and longer duration conditions (e.g., 100 vs. 500 vs. 1250 ms). In these experiments, a bias towards pain was confirmed. Gender differences were also found, especially in the longer presentation conditions. Expressive body postures captured the attention of women for longer compared to men. These results are discussed in light of their implications for why there are gender differences in attention to pain, and what impact this has on pain behaviour. PERSPECTIVE: We show that men and women might differ in how they direct their attention towards bodily expressions, including pain. These results have relevance to understanding how carers might attend to the pain of others, as well as highlighting the wider role that social-contextual factors have in pain.Copyright © 2021 United States Association for the Study of Pain, Inc. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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