Sadness enhances the experience of pain via neural activation in the anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala: an fMRI study.
Pain is a multidimensional experience. Human pain perception can be modulated by subjective emotional responses. We examined this association within the context of a neuroimaging study, using functional MRI to examine neural responses to electrical pain-inducing stimuli in 15 healthy subjects (6 females; age range=20-30 years). Pain-inducing stimuli were presented during different emotional contexts, which were induced via the continuous presentation (5 s) of sad, happy, or neutral pictures of faces. We found that subjective pain ratings were higher in the sad emotional context than in the happy and neutral contexts, and that pain-related activation in the ACC was more pronounced in the sad context relative to the happy and neutral contexts. Psychophysiological interaction (PPI) and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) analyses demonstrated amygdala to ACC connections during the experience of pain in the sad context. These findings serve to highlight the neural mechanisms that may be relevant to understanding the broader relationship between somatic complaints and negative emotion.
Yoshino
Atsuo
A
Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences, Division of Frontier Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences, Hiroshima University, Minami-ku, Hiroshima, Japan.
Okamoto
Yasumasa
Y
Onoda
Keiichi
K
Yoshimura
Shinpei
S
Kunisato
Yoshihiko
Y
Demoto
Yoshihiko
Y
Okada
Go
G
Yamawaki
Shigeto
S
D000328:Adult; D000679:Amygdala / Q000503:physiopathology*; D001921:Brain / Q000503:physiopathology; D001931:Brain Mapping; D004558:Electric Stimulation; D004644:Emotions / Q000502:physiology*; D005149:Facial Expression; D005260:Female; D006179:Gyrus Cinguli / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010146:Pain / Q000503:physiopathology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D010812:Physical Stimulation; D011601:Psychophysics; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology; D055815:Young Adult