Orienting Attention Modulates Pain Perception: An ERP Study

Chan, S.C.; Chan, Che Hin; Kwan, Alan; Ting, K.H.; Chui, Tak-yi

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0040215

Cited by 37 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…Both participants then underwent a psychophysical pain calibration procedure (similar to the one used in ref. 49). This process enabled us to determine reliable values for painful and nonpainful stimulation by asking participants to rate each stimulus on a seven-point scale ranging from 1 = "perceptible, but clearly nonpainful sensation" to 7 = "unbearable pain."…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain

Rütgen

Seidel

Silani

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

218

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Empathy for pain activates brain areas partially overlapping with those underpinning the first-hand experience of pain. It remains unclear, however, whether such shared activations imply that pain empathy engages similar neural functions as first-hand pain experiences. To overcome the limitations of previous neuroimaging research, we pursued a conceptually novel approach: we used the phenomenon of placebo analgesia to experimentally reduce the first-hand experience of pain, and assessed whether this results in a concomitant reduction of empathy for pain. We first carried out a functional MRI experiment (n = 102) that yielded results in the expected direction: participants experiencing placebo analgesia also reported decreased empathy for pain, and this was associated with reduced engagement of anterior insular and midcingulate cortex: that is, areas previously associated with shared activations in pain and empathy for pain. In a second step, we used a psychopharmacological manipulation (n = 50) to determine whether these effects can be blocked via an opioid antagonist. The administration of the opioid antagonist naltrexone blocked placebo analgesia and also resulted in a corresponding "normalization" of empathy for pain. Taken together, these findings suggest that pain empathy may be associated with neural responses and neurotransmitter activity engaged during first-hand pain, and thus might indeed be grounded in our own pain experiences.T here is widespread consensus that empathy recruits brain structures that are also involved in the first-hand experience of the emotion for which one is showing empathy. For example, in the domain of pain, recent image-based and coordinate-based meta-analyses of functional MRI (fMRI) studies have shown that sharing the pain of others consistently activates the bilateral anterior insular (AI) and anterior midcingulate cortex (aMCC) (1). The AI and aMCC are key areas of the network of areas activated by pain, and their activity has been directly related to the affective-motivational component of pain (2). The observation of such shared neural activations has therefore motivated simulationist models, such as the shared representations account of empathy (see refs. 3-5 for review), which propose that we come to understand the feelings of others by engaging the same mental representations as when directly experiencing the emotion with which we are empathizing.However, neuroimaging alone cannot provide sufficient empirical support for such claims because fMRI activation of the same brain area does not necessarily imply equivalence of mental representations and neural functions (see ref. 6 for review). Areas such as the aMCC and AI, for example, are not only activated by pain, but also by phenomena as distinct as cognitive control and responding to salient events in general (see refs. 7-9 for review). This ambiguity is a result of inherent methodological limitations. First, fMRI has mostly been used as a correlational method that identifies neural responses co-occurring with certain c...

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain

Rütgen

Seidel

Silani

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

192

218

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…P3a is induced by novel or unexpected stimuli, while P3b is associated with context updating and subsequent memory storage (Coull, 1998;Polich, 2007). P600, sometimes referred to as late positive component or positive slow wave has been associated with several higher-level functions, including syntactic processing, item recognition and working memory capacity (Chan et al, 2012;Friedman and Johnson, 2000;Lefebvre et al, 2005;Mecklinger 2010;Swaab et al, 2012). We chose to analyze P3a, P3b, and P600 components.…”

Section: Visual Verbal Learning Testmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cognitive effects of methylphenidate and levodopa in healthy volunteers

Linssen¹,

Sambeth²,

Vuurman³

et al. 2014

European Neuropsychopharmacology

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“…In particular, focused attention and distraction enable the modulation of the perception of pain intensity . In (Chan et al, 2012) authors have shown that the brain enables to shift attention to a self-generated sub-nociceptive image and to rehearse it. Event-related potentials were used to study the possible processes associated with a focus-then-orient attention strategy.…”

Section: Attention -Pain Interactionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchical nonlinear dynamics of human attention

Rabinovich

Tristan

Varona

2015

Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews

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Attention is the process of focusing mental resources on a specific cognitive/behavioral task. Such brain dynamics involves different partially overlapping brain functional networks whose interconnections change in time according to the performance stage, and can be stimulus-driven or induced by an intrinsically generated goal. The corresponding activity can be described by different families of spatiotemporal discrete patterns or sequential dynamic modes. Since mental resources are finite, attention modalities compete with each other at all levels of the hierarchy, from perception to decision making and behavior. Cognitive activity is a dynamical process and attention possesses some universal dynamical characteristics. Thus, it is time to apply nonlinear dynamical theory for the description and prediction of hierarchical attentional tasks. Such theory has to include the analyses of attentional control stability, the time cost of attention switching, the finite capacity of informational resources in the brain, and the normal and pathological bifurcations of attention sequential dynamics. In this paper we have integrated today's knowledge, models and results in these directions.

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Orienting Attention Modulates Pain Perception: An ERP Study

Cited by 37 publications

References 61 publications

Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain

Placebo analgesia and its opioidergic regulation suggest that empathy for pain is grounded in self pain

Cognitive effects of methylphenidate and levodopa in healthy volunteers

Hierarchical nonlinear dynamics of human attention

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