Neural and psychological mechanisms of pain perception

疼痛感知的神经和心理机制

• 批准号: 10265203
• 负责人: Lauren Atlas
• 金额: $ 17.96万
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 至
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10265203
• 关键词: Acute Pain; Affective; Animal Model; Arousal; Atlases; Attention; Back; Behavior; Behavioral; Brain; COVID-19 pandemic; Calibration; Clinical; Cognitive; Computer Models; Cues; Data; Data Analyses; Data Collection; Databases; Dissociation; Doctor of Philosophy; Eligibility Determination; Emotions; Expectancy; Experimental Psychology; Faculty; Female; Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Future; Galvanic Skin Response; Goals; Hormonal; Human; Human Characteristics; Individual; Judgment; Korea; Lead; Learning; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Manuscripts; Measures; Mediating; Modality; Nervous system structure; Neuraxis; Neurobiology; Neurosciences; Opioid Analgesics; Organism; Outcome; Pain; Pain Threshold; Pain management; Paper; Participant; Pathway interactions; Patient Self-Report; Patient-Focused Outcomes; Perception; Physiological; Placebo Effect; Placebos; Population; Positioning Attribute; Postdoctoral Fellow; Procedures; Process; Protocols documentation; Psychological Factors; Psychophysiology; Publications; Published Comment; Publishing; Questionnaires; Randomized; Reaction Time; Reporting; Research; Research Design; Resolution; Sex Differences; Shock; Signal Transduction; Sodium Chloride; Specificity; Stimulus; Taste Perception; Testing; Time; Uncertainty; Visit; Work; affective neuroscience; analytical method; base; behavior measurement; conditioning; contextual factors; emotional experience; expectation; experience; experimental study; follow-up; healthy volunteer; heat stimulus; hedonic; human model; human subject; mindfulness; neurobiological mechanism; neuroimaging; neuromechanism; pain perception; pain processing; pain relief; pain sensitivity; placebo analgesia; programs; psychologic; relating to nervous system; response; screening; sugar; visual tracking

This was the sixth year of the Section on Affective Neuroscience and Pain, and the lab continued to grow and see former fellows move on to exciting new positions. Three new fellows (one postdoc, two postbacs) joined the lab in 2020, and one postbac began a Neuroscience PhD program at UCLA. We continued to make progress on our human subjects protocol "Neural and psychological mechanisms of pain perception." The protocol includes five sub-studies designed to a) isolate different aspects of pain modulation, b) compare acute pain modalities (e.g., thermal pain versus shock-induced pain), and c) compare and contrast pain with other hedonic and perceptual domains (e.g., taste). In all studies, we measure decisions about pain experience (self-report) as well as neural and physiological responses to noxious stimuli that cause pain. During analysis, we combine computational modeling with advanced neuroimaging analyses to isolate the neural and psychological mechanisms that mediate the effects of expectations, attention, and emotion on subjective pain. Our protocol requires all participants to go through an initial calibration session, following screening. Participants complete questionnaires, and then undergo a procedure that measures pain ratings in response to noxious heat stimuli and determines each participants pain threshold and tolerance. 338 individuals completed this procedure to date (11 participants during Year 6 of the protocol, FY19-20, in addition than those who completed the procedure as part of the NCCIH screening protocol, 16-AT-0077). We published one manuscript using data from this protocol in the past fiscal year (Rahnev et al., 2020, Nature Human Behavior) and submitted two additional manuscripts (Dildine, Necka, Atlas, Under review). Two of these papers focus on data from a subset of participants who provided confidence ratings during the pain calibration procedure. These data were included in a Confidence Database (Rahnev et al., 2020) to provide for cross modal comparisons of confidence in perceptual processes. We also analyzed the association between confidence in pain ratings and implicit behavioral measures during the pain rating process, namely eye tracking and reaction time. For the first time, we demonstrated that individuals can provide meta-cognitive judgments about their subjective pain, and that confidence is predicted by reaction time during pain rating. In future work, we will draw on these findings to measure the associations between expectations, uncertainty, and pain. We hypothesize that placebos might decrease pain but increase uncertainty. This paper (Dildine, Necka, and Atlas, Under review) is currently under review and we anticipate publication in FY21. A third paper (Mischkowski et al., Under revision) measures the association between dispositional mindfulness and pain during the calibration procedure. We found that individuals who report higher levels of mindfulness report less pain in post-task questionnaires, but show no difference in pain ratings collected during or immediately after noxious stimulation. We have completed data collection for two fMRI sub-studies in previous years and are currently preparing manuscripts for submission. In January 2020 we completed fMRI data collection from our third fMRI sub-study, which measures the relationship between pain and pleasant and unpleasant taste perception and how expectations modulate perception across domains (Lee et al., In progress). This study measures how predictive cues modulate pain, sugar perception, and salt perception. This study involves two visits: one outside the scanner to identify each subjects threshold and tolerance, and one inside the scanner in which participants are randomized to receive sugar, salt, or heat in a conditioning paradigm. This project was led by a postdoc in the Section, Dr. In-Seon Lee, until she began her faculty position in Korea in September 2019. Data collection for the remaining participants was completed in January 2020 by our data analyst and a postbac in the lab. 60 participants completed the fMRI study (20 per group) and we found significant cue-based expectancy effects on perceived intensity across groups, irrespective of modality. However cue effects on subjective valence were less robust and varied across modalities. We have begun pre-registered fMRI analyses aimed at isolating domain-specific as well as domain-general mechanisms that underlie expectancy, affective learning, and perception. We anticipate that the manuscript for this study will be submitted in FY21. Obviously the need to halt healthy volunteer research due to the COVID19 pandemic was a set-back for data collection progress on this protocol. However, we successfully shifted gears to focus on data analysis, as well as other experiments that involve online data collection. In addition to the study-specific analyses mentioned above, we also focused on new analyses relating data across sub-studies. First, we have looked at the reliability of our pain calibration procedure, to determine whether individuals report stable pain thresholds and tolerance across sessions. Although correlations are high, the intraclass correlation values to evaluate test-retest reliability of calibration measures are fair, suggesting that it is important for us to continue to calibrate individuals on each visit, and that pain sensitivity varies substantially within individuals. Preliminary analyses suggest that there are no consistent sex differences in reliability, therefore hormonal status is not a likely cause of fluctuations in sensitivity (further indicating that female participants should be included in all studies). We are currently measuring whether reliability varies as a function of the duration between visits, and whether the context (MRI scanner or behavioral experiment) alters sensitivity. We have also analyzed skin conductance data from all sub-studies using different analytic methods, and are comparing approaches to determine the best way to measure heat-evoked autonomic arousal. We expect both of these analysis projects to lead to independent publications to be submitted in early FY21. Fortunately we have received approval to resume healthy volunteer research. We plan to start with the sub-study designed to measure the relationship between attention and perception, and to resume piloting our follow up experiment comparing pain and taste perception with high resolution 7-tesla MRI. These projects will be led by a new postdoc in the lab and by the data analyst. In addition to the projects mentioned above, we published several collaborative papers, reviews, and commentaries that are relevant to this line of research including one paper on brain-body relationships and pain specificity (Lee et al., 2020), one paper on opioid analgesia (Leknes and Atlas 2020), and three collaborative papers on pain and placebo analgesia (Zheng et al., 2019; Geuter et al., 2020; Evers et al, In press).

这是情感神经科学和疼痛小组的第六年，实验室继续发展，看到以前的研究员转到令人兴奋的新职位。三名新研究员（一名博士后，两名博士后）于2020年加入实验室，其中一名博士后在加州大学洛杉矶分校开始了神经科学博士课程。