Highlights
- •We collected ratings of pain and laser evoked potentials (LEPs) to investigate the interaction between visual analgesia and crossed-arms analgesia.
- •We found that vision of the affected body part in the crossed-arms position was associated with a significant reduction of pain reports.
- •However, we also found no analgesic effect of viewing the hand in an uncrossed position or of crossing the arms alone.
- •The effect of vision of the hand was indexed by an increase of late vertex LEP P2 amplitude.
Abstract
Studies report that viewing the body or keeping one's arms crossed while receiving
painful stimuli may have an analgesic effect. Interestingly, changes in ratings of
pain are accompanied by a reduction of brain metabolism or of laser evoked potentials
amplitude. What remains unknown is the link between visual analgesia and crossed-arms
related analgesia. Here, we investigated pain perception and laser evoked potentials
in 3 visual contexts while participants kept their arms in a crossed or uncrossed
position during vision of 1) one's own hand, 2) a neutral object in the same spatial
location, and 3) a fixation cross placed in front of the participant. We found that
having vision of the affected body part in the crossed-arms position was associated
with a significant reduction in pain reports. However, no analgesic effect of having
vision of the hand in an uncrossed position or of crossing the arms alone was found.
The increase of the late vertex laser evoked potential P2 amplitude indexed a general
effect of vision of the hand. Our results hint at a complex interaction between cross-modal
input and body representation in different spatial frames of reference and at the
same time question the effect of visual analgesia and crossed-arms analgesia alone.
Perspective
We found that nociceptive stimuli delivered to the hand in a crossed-arms position
evoke less pain than in a canonical anatomic position. Yet we report no significant
analgesic effect of vision or crossing the arms on their own. These findings foster
the integration of visuospatial and proprioceptive information in rehabilitation protocols.
Key words
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Article info
Publication history
Published online: February 24, 2015
Accepted:
February 4,
2015
Received in revised form:
December 17,
2014
Received:
October 2,
2014
Footnotes
S.M.A. is supported by EU Information and Communication Technologies Grant (VERE project, FP7-ICT-2009-5, Prot. Num. 257695) and the Italian Ministry of Health (and RF-2010-2312912).
The authors report no conflict of interest.
Identification
Copyright
© 2015 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
