Abstract
Pain impairs reward processing, and people suffering from physical pain are at high risk of having a persistently low mood. Although individuals with chronic pain have reported reduced reward responsiveness and impaired mood, it is not clear if reward responsiveness and mood are impaired in samples with sub-clinical pain scores otherwise healthy. Investigating a sub-clinical group is essential to disentangle the influence of medication on the behavioural effect of reward on mood and performance. Here, we aimed to examine the effects of reward on mood and performance in a sample of university students divided into a control group without clinically significant pain symptoms (N = 40) and the sub-clinical group with significant pain symptoms (N = 39). We used the Fribourg reward task and the pain sub-scale of the Symptom Checklist (SCL-27-plus) to assess the physical symptoms of pain. A significant positive correlation was found between average mood ratings and average monetary reward in the control group (r38 = 0.42, p = 0.008) and not significant in the sub-clinical group (r37 = 0.12, p = 0.46). The results might yield first insights into the relationship between pain and reward in sub-clinical populations without the confound of medication.
Highlights
In everyday life, a reward describes any event or object that can produce a positive or pleasurable experience (White, 2011; Gupta, 2019, for a review)
Another study used a monetary incentive delay task and functional magnetic resonance imaging on 17 female individuals with fibromyalgia to understand the neural processing of reward in chronic pain; this study showed that the individuals with chronic pain reported lower arousal ratings and showed reduced medial prefrontal cortex activity during monetary reward anticipation, which is related to lower estimated reward, in comparison to healthy controls (Martucci et al, 2018)
We hypothesized that the sub-clinical group would show a reduction in the effect of a monetary reward on mood ratings compared to the control group
Summary
A reward describes any event or object that can produce a positive or pleasurable experience (White, 2011; Gupta, 2019, for a review). Pain and reward have been shown to interact (Gandhi et al, 2013). The interaction between reward and pain is conceptualized in Field’s (2006) motivation-decision model. The effect of pain on reward processing has been confirmed experimentally in humans (Becker et al, 2013). Individuals with chronic pain reported a decreased response to environmental incentives and reduced reward responsiveness to monetary reward via self-report questionnaires (Liu et al, 2019). An experimental study conducted using the Behaviour Inhibition Scale/Behaviour Activation Scale to assess the reward drive and reward responsiveness showed that reward responsiveness is reduced in individuals with chronic pain (Turner et al, 2021). The previous studies indicate that pain impairs reward processing (Becker et al, 2012; Gandhi et al, 2014)
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