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People in Pain Make Poorer Decisions - authors' accepted version.pdf (589.83 kB)

People in pain make poorer decisions

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journal contribution
posted on 2019-03-07, 10:54 authored by Nina Attridge, Jayne Pickering, Matthew InglisMatthew Inglis, Edmund Keogh, Christopher Eccleston
Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 people and has been shown to disrupt attention. Here, we investigated whether pain disrupts everyday decision making. In Study 1, 1322 participants completed two tasks online: a shopping decisions task and a measure of decision outcomes over the previous 10 years. Participants who were in pain during the study made more errors on the shopping task than those who were pain-free. Participants with a recurrent pain condition reported more negative outcomes from their past decisions than those without recurrent pain. In Study 2, 44 healthy participants completed the shopping decisions task with and without experimentally-induced pain. Participants made more errors while in pain than while pain-free. We suggest that the disruptive effect of pain on attending translates into poorer decisions in more complex and ecologically valid contexts, that the effect is causal, and that the consequences are not only attentional, but financial.

Funding

Study 1 was in part funded by an unrestricted grant from Reckitt Benckiser UK Commercial Ltd to CE and EK.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematical Sciences

Published in

PAIN The Journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain

Volume

160

Issue

7

Pages

1662 - 1669

Citation

ATTRIDGE, N. ... et al., 2019. People in pain make poorer decisions. Pain, 160 (7), pp.1662-1669.

Publisher

© International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This is a non-final version of an article published in final form in ATTRIDGE, N. ... et al., 2019. People in pain make poorer decisions. Pain, 160 (7), pp.1662-1669.

Acceptance date

2019-02-21

Publication date

2019-07-01

ISSN

0304-3959

eISSN

1872-6623

Language

  • en

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