The overgeneralization of pain-related fear in individuals with higher pain sensitivity: A behavioral and event-related potential study

Abstract

Fear generalization contributes to the development and maintenance of pain. Pain sensitivity has been proposed to predict the strength of fear responses to aversive stimuli. However, whether individual variation in pain sensitivity affects pain-related fear generalization and its underlying cognitive processing remains unclear. To address this gap, we recorded behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) data among 22 high pain sensitivity (HPS) and 22 low pain sensitivity (LPS) healthy adults when exposed to a fear generalization paradigm. The behavioral results indicate that the HPS group displayed higher unconditioned stimulus expectancy and greater fear, arousal, and anxiety ratings to conditioned stimulus and generalization stimulus than the LPS group (all p values < 0.05). The ERP results showed that the HPS group exhibited a larger late positive potential evoked by GS2, GS3 and CS- (all p < 0.005) but a smaller N1 evoked by all CS and GSs (all p values < 0.05) relative to the LPS group. These findings suggest that individuals with a high level of pain sensitivity allocate more attention resources to pain-related threatening stimuli, which contributes to an overgeneralization of pain-related fear.