Abstract
Pain is a multidimensional phenomenon. Previous psychological studies have shown that
a person’s subjective pain threshold can change when certain emotions are recognized.
We examined this association with magnetoencephalography. Magnetic field strength
was recorded with a 306-channel neuromagnetometer while 19 healthy subjects (7 female,
12 male; age range = 20–30 years) experienced pain stimuli in different emotional
contexts induced by the presentation of sad, happy, or neutral facial stimuli. Subjects
also rated their subjective pain intensity. We hypothesized that pain stimuli were
affected by sadness induced by facial recognition. We found: 1) the intensity of subjective
pain ratings increased in the sad emotional context compared to the happy and the
neutral contexts, and 2) event-related desynchronization of lower beta bands in the
right hemisphere after pain stimuli was larger in the sad emotional condition than
in the happy emotional condition. Previous studies have shown that event-related desynchronization
in these bands could be consistently observed over the primary somatosensory cortex.
These findings suggest that sadness can modulate neural responses to pain stimuli,
and that brain processing of pain stimuli had already been affected, at the level
of the primary somatosensory cortex, which is critical for sensory processing of pain.
Perspective
We found that subjective pain ratings and cortical beta rhythms after pain stimuli
are influenced by the sad emotional context. These results may contribute to understanding
the broader relationship between pain and negative emotion.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: April 20, 2012
Accepted:
December 22,
2011
Received in revised form:
November 12,
2011
Received:
August 7,
2011
Footnotes
Supported by Grants-in-Aid for Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology, and Contract Research from National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, Japan.
There are no conflicts of interest related to this study.
Identification
Copyright
© 2012 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
