The generalization of fear of touch-related pain

The fear-avoidance model posits that pain-related fear plays a crucial role in the development and maintenance of chronic pain and previous research shows that pain-related fear can be evoked by tactile stimulation using a classical conditioning paradigm. In this research we extend the previous paradigm by using (non-painful) vibrotactile stimulation to the fingertip of one digit (e.g. left index finger) paired with painful electrocutaneous stimulation (CS+) to evoke cued pain-related fear, whilst vibrotactile stimulation to another finger (e.g. left pinky finger) is never paired with pain (CS-). This cued pain-related fear is hypothesized to spread to similar stimuli (e.g. vibrotactile stimulation of the left middle and ring finger) with decreasing fear responses as stimuli become less similar to the CS+. However, in the case of contextual pain-related fear, that is, the fear experienced when a context is associated with unpredictable pain then we would expect a flat generalization gradient between two CSs (e.g. vibrotactile stimulation to the right index and pinky finger) that are not predictive of the pain occurrence. The preliminary results from this experiment will be presented at the meeting.status: publishe