Psychology of Pain, Hypervigilance and Attention to Pain

Hypervigilance to pain or somatic sensations is the excessive tendency to attend to pain/somatic sensations, or the excessive readiness to select pain-related information over other information from the environment. In the context of pain, hypervigilance is assumed to be initiated and maintained by its immediate threat value. Pain-related fear and catastrophic thinking have often been found to be strong predictors of hypervigilance to pain.