Pain Modulates Responses to Emotional Stimuli

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Wanchen Li¹  Peiyi Liu¹  Yuanyan Hu³  Jing Meng¹ 

[1] Key Laboratory of Applied Psychology, Chongqing Normal University;School of Education, Chongqing Normal University;Key Laboratory of Emotion and Mental Health, Chongqing University of Arts and Sciences

关键词: pain;    emotional stimuli;    sad scenes;    negative emotional stimuli processing;    attentional processing;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2020.595987

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

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.

【 授权许可】

CC BY