Pain modulates neural responses to reward in the medial prefrontal cortex

Abstract

Pain has been found to promote reward‐seeking behaviors, which might be a consequence of modulated brain activities in the reward neural circuitry in a painful state. The present study investigated how pain affected reward processing and reward‐related neural activities using fMRI technique. A total of 50 healthy participants were recruited and used for data analyses, with half being treated with topical capsaicin cream and the other half with hand cream (treatment: pain or control). The participants were asked to perform a card‐guessing game when their brain activities responding to feedbacks (outcome: win or loss) were recorded. Behavioral results showed that participants in pain group overestimated their correct choices in the card‐guess game. Whole‐brain fMRI analysis revealed that the main effect of outcome (win vs. loss) activated a typical network of the reward neural circuitry, including the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the bilateral nucleus accumbens (NAcc). Importantly, the region of interest analysis revealed a significant interaction of treatment and outcome in the mPFC, with increased mPFC neural activity responding to win outcome in pain condition. Moreover, the functional connectivity between the mPFC and the NAcc was decreased in pain condition. We conclude that the pain‐induced modulation of the mPFC activity could result in alterations of both the emotional response to and the cognitive evaluation of reward.

Pain and social decision-making: New insights from the social framing effect

“…In addition, regarding the impact of emotion on decision-making (see Section 3), an unsolved problem is whether empathy and guilt elicited by pain in others modulate decision-making directly (as suggested by the risk-as-feeling hypothesis) or through cognitive evaluation (as suggested by the affect-as-information hypothesis). Finally, our findings indicate a close relationship between reward processing and pain processing, which has been acknowledged recently and needs to be explored further [156,157].…”

The Distinct Functions of Dopaminergic Receptors on Pain Modulation: A Narrative Review

“…The mPFC has a critical role in both reward and pain processing [ 86 ]. Projection of adrenergic neurons from VTA to mPFC (the DA inputs from VTA to mPFC) regulates the neural functions of mPFC (e.g., executive activities, excitability, and synaptic transmission) [ 87 ].…”

Pain Modulates Responses to Emotional Stimuli

“…In accordance with previous studies (Wang et al, 2018(Wang et al, , 2019, two treatments were applied to the participants. In the painful treatment, 0.1 mL of Capzasin-HP cream (capsaicin 0.1%; CHATTEM, United States) was applied to a 2 cm× 2 cm area on the inside of the left forearm.…”

“…Pain has evolutionary significance to humans, whereby the behaviors evoked by pain are critical for human survival (Wang et al, 2019). Recently, the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) revised pain as "an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage" (Raja et al, 2020).…”

“…However, the limitation of these modalities is that they are often short in duration. Recently, according to the heat/capsaicin sensitization model ( Modir and Wallace, 2010 ), capsaicin has been used to induce a moderate level of sustained painful sensations ( Wang et al, 2018 , 2019 ). Furthermore, capsaicin can reproduce the common symptoms of neuropathic pain ( Shenoy et al, 2011 ).…”