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Behavioural and neural evidence for self-reinforcing expectancy effects on pain.

Discussion in 'Other psychosomatic news and research' started by dreampop, Nov 14, 2018.

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  1. dreampop

    dreampop Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    Marieke Jepma, Leonie Koban, Johnny van Doorn, Matt Jones, Tor D. Wager.

    Behavioural and neural evidence for self-reinforcing expectancy effects on pain.

    Nature Human Behaviour, 2018; 2 (11): 838

    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0455-8

    Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0455-8

    Abstract

    Beliefs and expectations often persist despite evidence to the contrary. Here we examine two potential mechanisms underlying such ‘self-reinforcing’ expectancy effects in the pain domain: modulation of perception and biased learning. In two experiments, cues previously associated with symbolic representations of high or low temperatures preceded painful heat. We examined trial-to-trial dynamics in participants’ expected pain, reported pain and brain activity. Subjective and neural pain responses assimilated towards cue-based expectations, and pain responses in turn predicted subsequent expectations, creating a positive dynamic feedback loop. Furthermore, we found evidence for a confirmation bias in learning: higher- and lower-than-expected pain triggered greater expectation updating for high- and low-pain cues, respectively. Individual differences in this bias were reflected in the updating of pain-anticipatory brain activity. Computational modelling provided converging evidence that expectations influence both perception and learning. Together, perceptual assimilation and biased learning promote self-reinforcing expectations, helping to explain why beliefs can be resistant to change.
     
  2. Trish

    Trish Moderator Staff Member

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    Read this once, then I read it through twice
    Still puzzled, I read it through thrice
    I'm beginning to hate it
    Can someone translate it
    All I can tell you - pain is not nice.
     
    andypants, inox, ladycatlover and 9 others like this.
  3. James Morris-Lent

    James Morris-Lent Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    https://sci-hub.tw/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0455-8

    I think you can get the gist of it by looking at figures 1 and 2, and perhaps reading some of the methods section. The abstract is certainly opaque.

    What stands out to me is:
    -that they had people record their 'expectation' before writing down the 'experienced' pain. To me, recording the expectation would 'anchor' the rating of reported pain. (See figure 1d)

    -What they call NPS (neurological pain signature - which has something to do with fMRI response [see bottom of third page]) starts off showing different responses between high- and low- cue/expectation trials, but this difference seems to go away over time. (See figure 2e.) Presumably the early differences are enough to establish a statistically significant relationship for the whole study.

    -Taken together I would say that the relationship between whatever 'pain signature' activity they measured in the brain and expectancy-exacerbated pain rating is fleeting and the difference in pain ratings between high-expected pain trials and low-expected pain trials is an artifact of anchoring.

    -I think they just devised a weird game, got a few people to play, and modeled the hell out of the data they collected to support their theory of pain as a 'positive dynamic feedback loop' of expectation and experience.
     
    andypants, inox, ladycatlover and 7 others like this.
  4. obeat

    obeat Senior Member (Voting Rights)

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    It's one of those articles full of meaningless buzz words beloved by psychologists. Thank goodness the US are finally investing in drug research for pain.
     

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