Shanghai Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Psychological Crisis Intervention, Affiliated Mental Health Center (ECNU), School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; Institute of Brain and Education Innovation, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
Shanghai Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Psychological Crisis Intervention, Affiliated Mental Health Center (ECNU), School of Psychology and Cognitive Science, East China Normal University, Shanghai, China; Cognitive Neurophysiology, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, TU Dresden, Germany.
Brain Cogn. 2023 Jun;168:105972. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2023.105972. Epub 2023 Apr 18.
Pain elicits the desire for a reward to alleviate the unpleasant sensation. This may be a consequence of facilitated neural activities in the reward circuit. However, the temporal modulation of pain on reward processing remains unclear. We addressed this issue by recording electroencephalogram when participants received win or loss feedback in a simple gambling task. Pain treatment was conducted on 33 participants with topical capsaicin cream and on 33 participants with hand cream as a control. Results showed that pain generally increased the P300 amplitude for both types of feedback but did not affect feedback-related negativity (FRN). A significant interaction effect of treatment (painful, non-painful) and outcome (win, loss) was observed on delta oscillation as pain only enhanced the power of win feedback. In addition, the FRN and theta oscillation responded more to loss feedback, but this effect was unaffected by pain. These findings indicate that pain may enhance secondary value representation and evaluation processes of rewards, but does not influence primary distinction of reward or reward expectation. The temporal unfolding of how pain affects reward-related neural activities highlights the prominent impact of pain on high-level cognitive processes associated with reward.
疼痛会引发对缓解不适感觉的奖励的渴望。这可能是奖励回路中神经活动得到促进的结果。然而，疼痛对奖励加工的时间调制仍不清楚。我们通过记录参与者在简单赌博任务中收到赢或输反馈时的脑电图来解决这个问题。对 33 名参与者使用辣椒素乳膏进行疼痛处理，对 33 名参与者使用护手霜作为对照。结果表明，疼痛通常会增加两种反馈类型的 P300 幅度，但不会影响反馈相关负波（FRN）。在 delta 振荡中观察到处理（疼痛、不疼痛）和结果（赢、输）的显著交互作用，因为疼痛仅增强了赢反馈的功率。此外，FRN 和 theta 振荡对输反馈的反应更为敏感，但这种效果不受疼痛影响。这些发现表明，疼痛可能增强了奖励的次要价值表示和评估过程，但不影响奖励或奖励预期的主要区分。疼痛如何影响奖励相关神经活动的时间展开突出了疼痛对与奖励相关的高级认知过程的显著影响。
