The relationship between behavioural and mood responses to monetary rewards in a sample of students with and without reported pain

Abstract

Pain impairs reward processing, and people suffering from physical pain are at high risk of having a persistently low mood. Although individuals with chronic pain have reported reduced reward responsiveness and impaired mood, it is not clear if reward responsiveness and mood are impaired in samples with sub-clinical pain scores otherwise healthy. Investigating a sub-clinical group is essential to disentangle the influence of medication on the behavioural effect of reward on mood and performance. Here, we aimed to examine the effects of reward on mood and performance in a sample of university students divided into a control group without clinically significant pain symptoms (N = 40) and the sub-clinical group with significant pain symptoms (N = 39). We used the Fribourg reward task and the pain sub-scale of the Symptom Checklist (SCL-27-plus) to assess the physical symptoms of pain. A significant positive correlation was found between average mood ratings and average monetary reward in the control group (r38 = 0.42, p = 0.008) and not significant in the sub-clinical group (r37 = 0.12, p = 0.46). The results might yield first insights into the relationship between pain and reward in sub-clinical populations without the confound of medication.

Relationship between behavioral and mood responses to monetary rewards in a sample of Indian students with and without reported pain

“…The cut-off is the official cutoff specified in the manual. As we had used this methodology before in a similar study conducted on university students in Switzerland 11 , we wanted to use the same methodology and data analyses to be able to compare the Procedure. Students completed a battery of questionnaires online using LimeSurvey ® (LimeSurvey GmbH, Hamburg, Germany.…”

“…limes urvey. org) as well as an adapted online version of the Fribourg reward task 10,11 . In addition, the adapted version of the Fribourg reward task was performed online by the participants at their respective homes (due to the COVID situation) without the experimenter.…”

“…Our results showed that 49% of the students (n = 79) reported high levels of physical symptoms of pain. Moreover, students reporting non-chronic yet significant subclinical physical pain symptoms showed reduced mood responses to monetary reward (i.e., lower mood scores) when compared to students without sub-clinical pain symptoms 11 .…”

“…Similarly, chronic pain is highly comorbid with mood disorders 5,6 and several studies report the presence of dysfunctional reward pathways in co-occurring pain and mood alteration 7,8 . For instance, winning rewards such as monetary rewards are associated with an increase in self-reported mood in healthy controls [9][10][11] whereas impaired mood responsivity has been shown in people suffering from chronic pain 12 . This suggests that reward processing could be a mechanism underlying the relationship between pain and mood disorders 13 and an increase in mood responses has been associated with neural changes in regions involved in reward processes 14 .…”

“…Pain also alters reward responsivity in non-chronic samples 11,15 . Based on the findings of pain-related impairments in reward processing, we tested whether pain-related impairment in reward processing could also be observed in a sub-clinical population i.e., university students.…”