Can negative expectations increase pain and pain-related avoidance behavior?

Recruiting

Conditions: The experiment is done on healthy participants aged 18-35

Registration Number: NL-OMON21000

Lead Sponsor: eiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Brief Summary: /A

Detailed Description: Not available

Recruitment & Eligibility

Status: Recruiting

Sex: Not specified

Target Recruitment: 116

Inclusion Criteria

Healthy adults age 18-35; sensitivity to electrical pain (reaching a pain level that takes some effort to tolerate before reaching the max current of 8mA and can discriminate between the high and medium intensity stimuli)

Exclusion Criteria

Diagnosed conditions associated with chronic pain (pain lasting at least three months); diagnosed psychiatric or neurological conditions; drug use of more than 3 times a month; disabilities in the upper body; colorblindness; use of pacemaker; pregnancy or breastfeeding.

Study & Design

Study Type: Interventional

Study Design: Not specified

Primary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Difference in average pain scores (on a scale of 0 to 10) between the conditioned cue trials and control cue trials during the test phase; Proportion of participants that select the avoidance task (the difficult game).

Secondary Outcome Measures

Name	Time	Method
Individual factors such as state anxiety, pain catastrophizing, pain vigilance and awareness, fear of pain, aversiveness of stimuli, stimulus related fear and pain expectations regarding the stimuli, whether the expectations matched the actual experience, and game difficulty are also assessed for exploratory purposes.