2134/37095 Nina Attridge Nina Attridge Jayne Pickering Jayne Pickering Matthew Inglis Matthew Inglis Edmund Keogh Edmund Keogh Christopher Eccleston Christopher Eccleston People in pain make poorer decisions Loughborough University 2019 Pain Cognitive disruption Decision making Finances Numeracy Mathematical Sciences not elsewhere classified 2019-03-07 10:54:46 Journal contribution https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/People_in_pain_make_poorer_decisions/9377339 Chronic pain affects 1 in 5 people and has been shown to disrupt attention. Here, we investigated whether pain disrupts everyday decision making. In Study 1, 1322 participants completed two tasks online: a shopping decisions task and a measure of decision outcomes over the previous 10 years. Participants who were in pain during the study made more errors on the shopping task than those who were pain-free. Participants with a recurrent pain condition reported more negative outcomes from their past decisions than those without recurrent pain. In Study 2, 44 healthy participants completed the shopping decisions task with and without experimentally-induced pain. Participants made more errors while in pain than while pain-free. We suggest that the disruptive effect of pain on attending translates into poorer decisions in more complex and ecologically valid contexts, that the effect is causal, and that the consequences are not only attentional, but financial.