It is suggested that attention might play an important role in pain diseases.A few published studies have investigated whether pain patients show attentional biases (AB) toward pain-related stimuli, but with controversial findings.All these investigations employed only words and pictures that directly described pain.In this study, we applied stimuli that indicated the coming of pain to determine (a) whether people show AB to pain-related information;and (b) whether this bias was related with pain itself or the expectation of pain.Twenty-one patients with trigeminal neuralgia (TN), sixteen pain-free close relatives of these patients (either spouse or child), and 21 pain-free subjects who had no relationship with these patients participated in our study.Two dot probe tests were taken in these subjects.In one test, face pictures with painful or neutral expressions were used.