Topic 2.11: Psychology

Background and aims:
The disruptive effect of pain on attending has been demonstrated with experimentally-induced pain, chronic pain, and transient pain such as headache. Research in this field has predominantly focused on the effects of pain on simple cognitive processes. Here, we aimed to examine the impact of pain on higher-level real-world cognitive tasks requiring attention, namely numerical reasoning and decision making, which have serious consequences if one gets them wrong.

Methods:
In Study 1, 1322 participants completed two tasks online: a shopping decisions task and a measure of decision outcomes over the previous 10 years. In Study 2, which was pre-registered, 44 healthy participants completed a shopping decisions task with and without pain experimentally-induced with a cold pressor. 

Results:
In Study 1, 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, our pre-registered analysis showed that participants made more errors on the shopping decisions task while in pain than while pain-free.

Conclusions:
Our data suggest that the disruptive effect of pain on attention translates into poorer decisions in more complex and ecologically valid contexts. Study 2 showed that the effect of pain on decision making was causal. Our findings show, for the first time, that the consequences of disruption by pain are not only attentional, but financial.

PEOPLE IN PAIN MAKE POORER DECISIONS