• Blake F Dear, Louise Sharpe, Michael K Nicholas, and Kathryn Refshauge.
• The Centre for Emotional Health, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. blake.dear@mq.edu.au
• J Pain. 2011 Dec 1;12(12):1247-54.

UnlabelledIn recent years, there has been increasing acknowledgment of the need for psychometric data regarding the dot-probe paradigm. The aim of the present study was to provide some data on the psychometric properties of the dot-probe paradigm in the context of pain-related research. Using the data of a large pain-free sample and a large chronic pain sample, the present study examined the psychometric properties of a picture- and word-based dot-probe task. It also examined the data of idiosyncratically selected stimuli designed to be relevant to each participant and compared this with the data of neutral stimuli and nonsalient pain-related stimuli. Poor levels of internal consistency (α range: -.44 to .28; split-half r range: -.35 to .11) and test-retest reliability (r range: -.14 to .13) were found among the pain-free sample, irrespective of the task used or the stimuli used. There was limited evidence of comparability between the 2 tasks among the chronic pain sample (r range: -.08 to .26) and similarly poor levels of internal-consistency (α range: -.56 to .17; split-half r range: -.20 to .25). The findings of the present study therefore suggest that psychometric issues may be important to pain-related attentional bias research. More research is, however, undoubtedly needed.PerspectiveThe aim of the present study was to provide data regarding the psychometric properties of the dot-probe paradigm within the specific context of pain-related attentional bias research. The findings of this study suggest that psychometric issues may be an important consideration in pain-related attentional biases research.Copyright © 2011 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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