The never ending train journey on a piping hot day was all worth it in the end to be able to present our researching findings so far to the attendees of the Experimental Psychological Society conference in Bournemouth in July 2019.
The first step in our research on the psychosocial burden of psoriasis was to explore the attentional bias of healthy undergraduate students experiencing induced itch (we used histamine, we didn't tickle them!).
Attentional bias is the unconscious allocation of an individual's attention either towards or away from threatening information. An example of this would be in the context of arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Someone with arachnophobia would be more likely to quickly notice something that looked like a spider than someone who is not frightened of spiders..
If attentional bias is towards threatening information, this is known as hypervigilance. If it is away, it is known as avoidance.
There is a lot of research out there about attentional bias among those with anxiety conditions, but not much on itch or psoriasis. We wanted to find out whether itch caused attentional bias towards itch related words to start with, as we know itch is prominent and frustrating symptom of psoriasis.
We found that the undergraduate students we made itchy showed an avoidance of itchy words. We were surprised by this as a previous study found hypervigilance. We thought this was particularly interesting so we wanted to present this information to other psychological researchers, which we did whilst sweating profusely!
Lots of researchers showed a great deal of interest in our project, particularly when we explained our aims of measuring attentional bias among those with psoriasis.
You can access an electronic copy of the poster we presented here.
The first step in our research on the psychosocial burden of psoriasis was to explore the attentional bias of healthy undergraduate students experiencing induced itch (we used histamine, we didn't tickle them!).
Attentional bias is the unconscious allocation of an individual's attention either towards or away from threatening information. An example of this would be in the context of arachnophobia (fear of spiders). Someone with arachnophobia would be more likely to quickly notice something that looked like a spider than someone who is not frightened of spiders..
If attentional bias is towards threatening information, this is known as hypervigilance. If it is away, it is known as avoidance.
There is a lot of research out there about attentional bias among those with anxiety conditions, but not much on itch or psoriasis. We wanted to find out whether itch caused attentional bias towards itch related words to start with, as we know itch is prominent and frustrating symptom of psoriasis.
We found that the undergraduate students we made itchy showed an avoidance of itchy words. We were surprised by this as a previous study found hypervigilance. We thought this was particularly interesting so we wanted to present this information to other psychological researchers, which we did whilst sweating profusely!
Lots of researchers showed a great deal of interest in our project, particularly when we explained our aims of measuring attentional bias among those with psoriasis.
You can access an electronic copy of the poster we presented here.
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