Abstract
Pain and emotion are common subjective experiences that play vital roles in daily life. Pain has been clinically confirmed to increase depressive mood. However, little is known about how pain modulates cognitive emotional judgment processing. A better understanding of this may help explain the effect of pain on the development of depressive moods. We recruited 30 adult participants to test their responses to pictures of scenes (Experiment 1) and faces (Experiment 2) that represented happy, neutral, and sad emotions, while experiencing painful (induced via topical capsaicin cream) and control (hand cream) treatments. Results showed that participants in the painful condition showed lower accuracy to emotional scene stimuli and longer reaction times to both emotional scene and face stimuli, relative to the control condition. In addition, the difference values of the reaction times between the painful and control conditions were larger for sad scenes than for happy or neutral scenes. These results suggest that pain alters attentional processing of emotional stimuli, especially with regards to sad scene stimuli, which may explain how painful stimuli affect the development of depressive moods.
Highlights
Pain has evolutionary significance to humans, whereby the behaviors evoked by pain are critical for human survival (Wang et al, 2019)
There was a significant “treatment” × “emotion” interaction [F(2,28) = 12.57, p < 0.001, ηp2 = 0.30], which indicated that reaction times (RTs) for recognizing happy, neutral, and sad emotional pictures were significantly shorter in the control than in the painful treatment
The main goal of this study was to investigate how pain modulates emotional stimuli processing to provide insight into how painful stimuli affect the development of depressive moods
Summary
Pain has evolutionary significance to humans, whereby the behaviors evoked by pain are critical for human survival (Wang et al, 2019). The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) revised pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage” (Raja et al, 2020). Pain can be defined as a type of unpleasant emotional experience and includes the feelings of depression and sadness (Mokhtari et al, 2019). The motivational-affective dimension of pain is closely linked with emotion (Melzack and Casey, 1968). Similar brain regions represent both pain and emotion. The medial frontal cortex (including the anterior midcingulate cortex; Kragel et al, 2018), the midbrain periaqueductal gray (Buhle et al, 2013), and the hippocampus (Mokhtari et al, 2019) are involved in both pain and negative emotions, suggesting that the experience of pain influences the processing of negative emotions
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