Qigong Institute

Different brain networks mediate the effects of social and conditioned expectations on pain.

Author: Koban L^1,^2,^3,⁴, Jepma M⁵, López-Solà M⁶, Wager TD^7,^8,⁹
Affiliation:
¹Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA. leonie.koban@colorado.edu.
²Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA. leonie.koban@colorado.edu.
³Brain and Spine Institute (ICM), Control-Interoception-Attention Team, 47 Boulevard de l'Hôpital, 75013, Paris, France. leonie.koban@colorado.edu.
⁴Marketing Area, INSEAD, Boulevard de Constance, 77300, Fontainebleau, France. leonie.koban@colorado.edu.
⁵Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Nieuwe Achtergracht 129B, 1018 WS, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
⁶Division of Behavioral Medicine and Clinical Psychology, Department of Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, University of Cincinnati, 3333 Burnet Avenue, MLC2 7031 Pain Research Center, Cincinnati, OH, 45229, USA.
⁷Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA.
⁸Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Muenzinger D244, 345 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80302, USA.
⁹Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, HB 6207, Moore Hall, Hanover, NH, 03755, USA.
Conference/Journal: Nat Commun.
Date published: 2019 Sep 10
Other: Volume ID: 10 , Issue ID: 1 , Pages: 4096 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1038/s41467-019-11934-y. , Word Count: 153

Information about others' experiences can strongly influence our own feelings and decisions. But how does such social information affect the neural generation of affective experience, and are the brain mechanisms involved distinct from those that mediate other types of expectation effects? Here, we used fMRI to dissociate the brain mediators of social influence and associative learning effects on pain. Participants viewed symbolic depictions of other participants' pain ratings (social information) and classically conditioned pain-predictive cues before experiencing painful heat. Social information and conditioned stimuli each had significant effects on pain ratings, and both effects were mediated by self-reported expectations. Yet, these effects were mediated by largely separable brain activity patterns, involving different large-scale functional networks. These results show that learned versus socially instructed expectations modulate pain via partially different mechanisms-a distinction that should be accounted for by theories of predictive coding and related top-down influences.

PMID: 31506426 PMCID: PMC6736972 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-11934-y

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Different brain networks mediate the effects of social and conditioned expectations on pain.