The British journal of clinical psychology / the British Psychological Society
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Randomized Controlled Trial Clinical Trial
The effects of imagery and sensory detection distractors on different measures of pain: how does distraction work?
Two experiments compared the effects of different distraction tasks on pain. Based on multiple-resource theory, Expt 1 predicted that the more a distractor shares processing resources with pain perception the greater the interference between the two. Experiment 2 tested whether the emotional content of the distractor would differentially effect measures that are supposedly reflective of the affective component of pain. ⋯ These results indicate that a task that requires attention to external cues has more impact on pain than either a positive or neutral imagination task. However, it is not clear that the specific resources used by the distraction tasks moderated pain differentially as predicted by multiple-resource theory.