Emotional component of pain and pain perception in humans

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  • Ogino Yuichi
    Department of Anesthesiology, Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine
  • Nemoto Hidenori
    Department of Anesthesiology, Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine
  • Saito Shigeru
    Department of Anesthesiology, Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine
  • Goto Fumio
    Department of Anesthesiology, Gunma University Graduate School of Medicine
  • Inui Koji
    Department of Integrative Physiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences
  • Kakigi Ryusuke
    Department of Integrative Physiology, National Institute for Physiological Sciences The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI)

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  • 痛みの感情側面と痛覚認知
  • イタミ ノ カンジョウ ソクメン ト ツウカク ニンチ

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Pain is an unpleasant sensation that is subjective as well as emotional. Newly developed neuroimaging technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG) have extensively revealed the neural circuitry of the human brain and the cerebral mechanism of pain. In this review, we describe our recent studies of the emotional component of pain and its effect on pain perception in humans. In the first study, to testify the hypothesis that psychological pain was reflected in the pain-related neural network, we recorded cerebral hemodynamic responses using fMRI during imagination of pain (to imagine pain while viewing photographs showing painful events). The results showed that the imagination of pain was associated with increased activities in several brain regions involved in the pain-related neural network, especially in the anterior cingulate cortex, insula, and secondary somatosensory cortex. In another study, we recorded MEG and fMRI following noxious laser stimulation in a Yoga Master who claimed not to feel pain during meditation. The results showed that pain-related cortical activities recorded from the primary and secondary somatosensory cortices by MEG were absent during meditation. fMRI recording showed weaker activities in the thalamus, secondary somatosensory cortex, insula, and anterior cingulate cortex during meditation in contrast to those during non-meditation. Thus our recent neuroimaging studies indicate that the imagination of pain even without physical injury engages cortical representations of the pain-related neural network, and have clarified that our subjective emotional component of pain influences pain perception.

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