Journal of behavior therapy and experimental psychiatry
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J Behav Ther Exp Psychiatry · Mar 2021
Will that hurt? A contingency learning task to assess pain-expectancy judgments for low back postures.
Contingency learning, i.e. learning that a cue predicts the presence (or absence) of an event, is central to the formation of beliefs regarding painfulness of body postures. Such beliefs may spread to safe cues due to compromised learning (e.g., excessive generalization, impaired safety learning), prompting avoidance and leading to disability. Despite its importance, compromised learning about low back pain is underinvestigated. We propose a low back pain scenario contingency learning task for the investigation of back pain-related learning. ⋯ This task is an easily applicable, non-invasive way to investigate the formation of back pain-related threat beliefs.