Abstract: Objective To investigate the effect of experimental tourniquet pain on attentional bias towards pain-related words. Methods The tourniquet was tied to the left upper limb of 32 healthy college students, while tourniquet inflating (experiment 1) or not (experiment 2), all subjects were asked to finish the modified Stroop tasks including five kinds of pain-related words. The reaction time, the error rate of recognition task and the pain intensity and distress were recorded. Results Moderate to severe pain was induced by tourniquet inflating. In experiment 1, the reaction time for positive words of male was significantly shorter than female (P<0.001). In experiment 2, for sensory pain words, affective pain words and positive words, the reaction time of female was shorter than male significantly (P<0.001). This showed that pain has accelerated the cognitive reaction speed of male. The error rate was increased obviously in the condition of tourniquet pain (P<0.05), particularly for social threaten words (P<0.05). The bias index showed significant cognitive bias for the social threat words under condition of pain (P<0.05). Conclusion An attentional bias was found towards to social threat words in healthy subjects in moderate pain condition.

Key words: tourniquet pain, word recognition, attentional bias, modified Stroop task