All pain is not the same

A popular illustration of embodied cognition is the notion that physical pain and social pain share the same neural mechanism. The researchers that first published this relationship, have now published a new paper that finds the two types of pain do not overlap in the brain but are just close neighbours, close enough to have appeared together on the original fMRI scans. But the pattern of activity is different. The data has not changed but the method of analyzing it has produced a much clearer picture.

Neuroskeptic has a good blog on this paper and observes: “ Woo et al. have shown commendable scientific integrity in being willing to change their minds and update their theory based on new evidence. That sets an excellent example for researchers.” Have a look at the Neuroskeptic post (here).

It would probably be wise for other groups to re-examine, using multivariant analysis, similar data they have previously published.

 

 

 

 

Abstract of paper (Woo CW, Koban L, Kross E, Lindquist MA, Banich MT, Ruzic L, Andrews-Hanna JR, & Wager TD (2014). Separate neural representations for physical pain and social rejection. Nature Communications, 5 PMID: 25400102)

Current theories suggest that physical pain and social rejection share common neural mechanisms, largely by virtue of overlapping functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity. Here we challenge this notion by identifying distinct multivariate fMRI patterns unique to pain and rejection. Sixty participants experience painful heat and warmth and view photos of ex-partners and friends on separate trials. FMRI pattern classifiers discriminate pain and rejection from their respective control conditions in out-of-sample individuals with 92% and 80% accuracy. The rejection classifier performs at chance on pain, and vice versa. Pain- and rejection-related representations are uncorrelated within regions thought to encode pain affect (for example, dorsal anterior cingulate) and show distinct functional connectivity with other regions in a separate resting-state data set (N=91). These findings demonstrate that separate representations underlie pain and rejection despite common fMRI activity at the gross anatomical level. Rather than co-opting pain circuitry, rejection involves distinct affective representations in humans.”

 

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