The relationship of adult attachment to emotion, catastrophizing, control, threshold and tolerance, in experimentally-induced pain

Although insecure attachment has been associated with a range of variables linked with problematic adjustment to chronic pain, the causal direction of these relationships remains unclear. Adult attachment style is, theoretically, developmentally antecedent to cognitions, emotions and behaviours (and might therefore be expected to contribute to maladjustment). It can also be argued, however, that the experience of chronic pain increases attachment insecurity. This project examined this issue by determining associations between adult attachment characteristics, collected prior to an acute (coldpressor) pain experience, and a range of emotional, cognitive, pain tolerance, intensity and threshold variables collected during and after the coldpressor task. A convenience sample of 58 participants with no history of chronic pain was recruited. Results demonstrated that attachment anxiety was associated with lower pain thresholds; more stress, depression, and catastrophizing; diminished perceptions of control over pain; and diminished ability to decrease pain. Conversely, secure attachment was linked with lower levels of depression and catastrophizing, and more control over pain. Of particular interest were findings that attachment style moderated the effects of pain intensity on the tendency to catastrophize, such that insecurely attached individuals were more likely to catastrophize when reporting high pain intensity. This is the first study to link attachment with perceptions of pain in a pain-free sample. These findings cast anxious attachment as a vulnerability factor for chronic pain following acute episodes of pain, while secure attachment may provide more resilience. (c) 2006 International Association for the Study of Pain. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Attention vs. emotion: Affective learning and the startle reflex

The eye-blink startle reflex can be modulated by attentional and emotional processes. The reflex is facilitated during stimuli that engage attention. A linear pattern of emotional modulation has also been consistently demonstrated: the reflex is facilitated during unpleasant stimuli and attenuated during pleasant stimuli. However, during anticipation of pleasant or unpleasant stimuli it is unclear whether emotion or attention drives startle reflex modulation. This study used a differential learning procedure to investigate whether startle modulation during anticipation of a salient stimulus reflected emotional or attentional processes. In acquisition, a CS+ was paired with a pleasant or unpleasant US and a CS- was presented alone. In extinction, blink startle magnitude was measured during CS+ and CS-. Post-acquisition valence ratings and affective priming showed that CS+ had acquired the same affective value as the pleasant or unpleasant US with which it was paired. No differences in modulation of blink startle reflexes during pleasant CS+ and unpleasant CS+ were found throughout extinction. Blink startle facilitation occurred during CS+ but not CS- across the first third of extinction. Thus, attentional rather than emotional processes appeared to facilitate blink startle during anticipation of salient stimuli.

Dynamic response: Real-time adaptation for music emotion

Music plays an enormous role in today's computer games; it serves to elicit emotion, generate interest and convey important information. Traditional gaming music is fixed at the event level, where tracks loop until a state change is triggered. This behaviour however does not reflect musically the in-game state between these events. We propose a dynamic music environment, where music tracks adjust in real-time to the emotion of the in-game state. We are looking to improve the affective response to symbolic music through the modification of structural and performative characteristics through the application of rule-based techniques. In this paper we undertake a multidiscipline approach, and present a series of primary music-emotion structural rules for implementation. The validity of these rules was tested in small study involving eleven participants, each listening to six permutations from two musical works. Preliminary results indicate that the environment was generally successful in influencing the emotion of the musical works for three of the intended four directions (happier, sadder & content/dreamier). Our secondary aim of establishing that the use of music-emotion rules, sourced predominantly from Western classical music, could be applied with comparable results to modern computer gaming music was also largely successfully.