Modulation of pain perception and its neural basis
Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Final Report Abstract
Identical painful stimuli elicit different levels of pain experience and discomfort in different people. These differences also depend especially on the circumstances in which they are experienced. This diversity in pain perception has been shown to depend on a variety of factors, such as cognitive load and emotional states. For instance, both working memory load and positive emotional states can reduce the perception of pain substantially, and there are indications for a reduced pain perception during psychological stress as well. In contrast, negative affective states can enhance pain perception. The differential interaction of these different types of modulation effects with the response of the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) to pain stimuli, a pattern expression based on functional brain imaging data related to pain perception, however, is unclear. In addition, individual differences in emotion and pain processing should result in different modulation effects, based on the assumed and known pathways of those modulation effects. One personality dimension that is strongly associated with altered emotion processing is psychopathic personality. Psychopathic personality is related to emotion processing alterations. Thus the aim of this research project was to investigate brain response changes related to painful stimuli based on modulatory effects of attention shift, affective state and stress, and their moderation by individual differences such as psychopathic personality traits. In order to investigate those relationships, we examined 90 participants from general population (45 female and 45 male) using fMRI, thermal pain stimulation and a series of modulation tasks. These modulation tasks included working memory task, positive affect, induced via a positive movie, negative affect, induced by a negative movie, and stress, induced via a public speech instruction. Preliminary analyses of the behavioral data showed significantly reduced pain ratings during working memory load as well as an initial reduction of pain ratings in the modulation task using social threat. However, pain ratings did not change during positive or negative mood, but did increase above baseline after the mood induction. Further analyses will investigate the relationship of those effects in ratings to functional brain imaging responses, specifically the NPS response, as well as psychophysiological measures. Furthermore, individual differences in these effects will be investigated for both subjective and brain responses to pain stimuli during modulation tasks. The findings are highly relevant in terms of understanding pain processing and can have implications for how pain perception can be altered, at least for acute pain situations.
Publications
- (2014). Emotional facial expression evaluation in a stress induction task. Conference of the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, Boston
Eisenbarth, H., Chang, Luke J., Spicer, J., Yardley, H., & Wager, T. D.
- (2014). Predicting Autonomic Reactions from Brain Activity During a Stress Induction. Psychophysiology, 51(S1), S75
Eisenbarth, H., Chang, L., & Wager, T. D.
- (2015). Using a genetic algorithm to abbreviate the Psychopathic Personality Inventory–Revised (PPI-R). Psychological Assessment, 27(1), 194–202
Eisenbarth, H., Lilienfeld, S. O., & Yarkoni, T.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0000032) - The Challenges of Forecasting Resilience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 38, 2015, e98
Chang, Luke J., Reddan, M., Ashar, Y. K., Eisenbarth, H., & Wager, T. D.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14001496) - Multivariate Brain Prediction of Heart Rate and Skin Conductance Responses to Social Threat. Journal of Neuroscience, 23 November 2016, 36 (47) 11987-11998
Eisenbarth, H., Chang, L., & Wager, T. D.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3672-15.2016)
