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sLoreta solution for main ROIs relating to scalp LEP components: P1, P2a and P2b. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217909.g004
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Pain experience involves a complex relationship between sensory and both emotional and cognitive factors, which appear to be mediated by different neural pathways. Previous evidence has shown that whereas conscious processing of unpleasant stimuli enhances pain perception, the influence of emotions on pain under unaware conditions is much less know...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... order to identify the neural sources relating to the experimental effects observed at the scalp level, sLORETA maps were computed for each participant and experimental condition in relevant LEP amplitudes of P1, P2a and P2b. Subsequently, and as we explained in the Methods section, several ROIs were defined according to data-driven criteria (see Fig 4). Current densities associated with each ROI were quantified and subjected to ANOVAs. ...
Citations
... Concerning FMS, studies exploring ERPs and using emotional picture paradigms* (e.g., masking or cognitive paradigms) have confirmed an influence of emotional stimuli on pain processing (greater P50, smaller N80 amplitudes) (Montoya et al., 2005b), maladaptive affective attention modulation (ssVEP, steady-state visually evoked potentials) (Goldway et al., 2022), and early cerebral modulation of pain associated with an increase in automatic attention [greater P100, P200a, P200b amplitudes] (Peláez et al., 2019). Other studies have investigated the processing of emotional words in FMS using language (decision) (Montoya et al., 2005a;Sitges et al., 2007), emotional Stroop (Fischer-Jbali et al., 2022b;Mercado et al., 2013) or dot probe tasks (Cardoso et al., 2021) tasks. ...
... Regarding the characteristics of the selected studies, the publication year ranged between 2005 and 2022. Most studies included a control group of healthy participants (Cardoso et al., 2021;Fallon et al., 2015;Fernandes-Magalhaes et al., 2022;Fischer-Jbali et al., 2021, 2022a, 2022bGoldway et al., 2022;Gonzalez-Roldan et al., 2013;Mercado et al., 2013;Montoya et al., 2005a;Peláez et al., 2019;Pidal-Miranda et al., 2019;Sitges et al., 2007Sitges et al., , 2018; only one study did not include a control group (Montoya et al., 2005b). Further, one study included another chronic pain condition (Sitges et al., 2007) and another one differentiated between different degrees of depression severity (Sitges Sitges et al., 2007Sitges et al., , 2018, three in Austria (Fischer-Jbali et al., 2021, 2022a, 2022b, one in Portugal (Cardoso et al., 2021), one in the United Kingdom (Fallon et al., 2015), and one in the United States/Israel (Goldway et al., 2022). ...
... Among the 15 selected articles, 12 analyzed ERPs to evaluate emotional processing by comparing FMS patients and controls (Cardoso et al., 2021;Fallon et al., 2015;Fernandes-Magalhaes et al., 2022;Fischer-Jbali et al., 2021, 2022a, 2022bGoldway et al., 2022;Gonzalez-Roldan et al., 2013;Mercado et al., 2013;Montoya et al., 2005a;Peláez et al., 2019;Pidal-Miranda et al., 2019). Of the remaining three studies, one compared FMS patients with MSK (Montoya et al., 2005b) and another study compared FMS patients, controls and patients with MSK (Sitges et al., 2007). ...
Objective: The present systematic review and meta-analysis intended to: 1) determine the extent of abnormalities in emotional processing linked to emotional event-related potentials (ERPs) in Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) and 2) integrate data from similar emotional tasks into a meta-analysis to clearly demonstrate the scientific and clinical value of measuring emotional ERPs by electroencephalography (EEG) in FMS. Methods: A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies comparing emotional processing indicated by ERPs in FMS patients and healthy controls was conducted. Fifteen articles were included in the systematic review after applying the eligibility criteria. Results: Nine articles demonstrated disturbances in emotional processing in FMS. These emotional disturbances were distributed over the whole range of ERP latencies, mainly over central, parietal, temporal and occipital areas. Despite of this, quantitative analysis revealed only significant differences in N250 and LPP/LPC between FMS patients and healthy controls, with smaller LPP/LPC and greater N250 seen in FMS. Discussion: N250 and LPP/LPC seem to be the ERPs with the greatest potential to determine emotional alterations in FMS. These ERPs are related to complex cognitive processes such as decoding features relevant to affect recognition (N250) as well differentiation between emotions, persistent engagement, conflict resolution or evaluation of emotional intensity (LPC/LPP). However, differences in task setup had an important impact on the variation of ERP outcomes. Systematization of protocols and tasks is indispensable for future studies.
... To our knowledge, no study has employed event-related potentials (ERPs) as a methodology for studying the electroencephalographic responses associated with possible impairments in working memory -or any other cognitive ability-as a consequence of the virus. Multiple investigations have linked specific components of the ERP signal to different subprocesses of working memory (Chen and Mitra, 2009;Ferrera et al., 2023;Mercado et al., 2022) and it could be useful to detect electrophysiological changes in the absence of behavioural differences (Hinojosa et al., 2015;Peláez et al., 2019). The P3 component is undoubtedly the ERP that has attracted the most research. ...
Objective: Understanding the long-term impact of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) on cognitivefunction, even in mild cases, is critical to the well-being of individuals, especially for healthcare workerswho are at increased risk of exposure to the virus. To the best of our knowledge, the electrophysiologicalactivity underlying cognitive functioning has not yet been explored.Methods: Seventy-seven healthcare workers took part in the study (43 with mild infection about one yearbefore the study and 34 uninfected). To assess cognitive status, event-related potentials (ERPs) and beha-vioural responses were recorded while participants performed a working memory task.Results: COVID-19 participants exhibited a distinct neural pattern with lower parieto-occipital N1 ampli-tudes and higher frontal P2 amplitudes as compared to non-infected healthcare workers. We found nobehavioural differences (reaction times and error rates) in working memory functioning between groups.Conclusions: This neural pattern suggests the presence of a decrement of processing resources linked tothe encoding of sensory information (N1), followed by the enhanced of the P2 response which could beinterpreted as the activation of compensation mechanism in COVID-19 participants.Significance: The current findings point out that ERPs could serve as valuable neural indices for detectingdistinctive patterns in working memory functioning of COVID-19 participants, even in mild cases.However, further research is required to precisely ascertain the long-term cognitive effects of COVID-19 beyond one-year post-infection.
... Our findings contribute to previous research in several key areas. Firstly, prior studies have established a strong association between heightened pain responses and the priming of high threat value stimuli [49][50][51]. However, our study directly examined the impact of pain perception on participants' emotional and behavioral responses. ...
Background
What is our immediate reaction when we witness someone experiencing pain? The empathy-altruism hypothesis predicts that observers would display empathy and a tendency to approach the person in pain. Alternatively, the threat value of pain hypothesis (TVPH) argues that others' pain serves as a signal of threat and should induce observers’ avoidance response.
Methods
To examine these two hypotheses, three experiments were conducted. The experiments aimed to investigate the impact of subliminal exposure to others' physical pain on participants' emotional and behavioural responses.
Results
The results revealed that subliminal pain priming resulted in faster response and attentional bias to fearful faces compared to sad faces (Experiment 1), faster reaction times in recognizing fear-related words compared to anger-related words during a lexical decision task (Experiment 2), and faster avoidance responses towards anger-related words, as opposed to approaching responses towards positive words (Experiment 3).
Conclusions
The consistent findings across all experiments revealed that subliminal perception of pain scenes elicited fear emotion and immediate avoidance responses. Therefore, the outcomes of our study provide supportive evidence for the TVPH.
... Furthermore, patients with FM are less efficient in modulating pain through the positive effects and may derive fewer benefits from pleasant events (24). Kamping et al. (25) suggest that painrelated information, even when perceived unconsciously, is able to enhance exogenous (automatic) attention, by increasing the neural activity involvement (26). ...
... The patients with FM showed different patterns of arousal during the observation of the images. Due to the lesser adaptive capacity to all stimuli, they manifested abnormal arousal to all the images regardless of the content, including emotionally neutral ones (26). Furthermore, due to the social cognition alteration, the higher arousal was even more evident for images with pleasant or unpleasant situations involving people. ...
The pathogenesis of pain in fibromyalgia is still not completely understood. A disrupted emotional modulation could affect the physiology of nociception and contributes to an altered perception of pain. The aim of this study was to test the role of emotional arousal and valence in pain susceptibility in fibromyalgia using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) paradigm and the Fibromyalgia Severity Scale (FSS). The study focused on comparing emotional arousal and valence between patients with fibromyalgia and the control group. The secondary objective was to examine the correlation between emotional indices and scores on the FSS and the duration of the disease. The 20 patients with fibromyalgia enrolled showed a higher mean arousal score for all the stimuli, including a higher score for unpleasant and socially unpleasant stimuli. The valence scores for social-relevant stimuli were also higher. Increased arousal to unpleasant and socially unpleasant images and increased valence of them correlated with the duration of the disease and the severity of symptoms and could reflect impairment in social cognition and marked sensitivity to pain in interaction with central nociceptive dysregulation.
... CO 2 laser parameters were set to a power of 9 watts and a duration of 30 ms. These configuration parameters of the intensity of painful stimulation were selected according to data provided by previous studies (see Peláez et al., 2019, for a more detailed description). Painful stimulation was delivered via a mean beam diameter of 4 mm (density = 21 mJ/mm 2 ) over the dorsum of participants' non-dominant hand. ...
A large number of publications have focused on the study of pain expressions. Despite the growing knowledge, the availability of pain-related face databases is still very scarce compared with other emotional facial expressions. The Pain E-Motion Faces Database (PEMF) is a new open-access database currently consisting of 272 micro-clips of 68 different identities. Each model displays one neutral expression and three pain-related facial expressions: posed, spontaneous-algometer and spontaneous-CO2 laser. Normative ratings of pain intensity, valence and arousal were provided by students of three different European universities. Six independent coders carried out a coding process on the facial stimuli based on the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), in which ratings of intensity of pain, valence and arousal were computed for each type of facial expression. Gender and age effects of models across each type of micro-clip were also analysed. Additionally, participants' ability to discriminate the veracity of pain-related facial expressions (i.e., spontaneous vs posed) was explored. Finally, a series of ANOVAs were carried out to test the presence of other basic emotions and common facial action unit (AU) patterns. The main results revealed that posed facial expressions received higher ratings of pain intensity, more negative valence and higher arousal compared with spontaneous pain-related and neutral faces. No differential effects of model gender were found. Participants were unable to accurately discriminate whether a given pain-related face represented spontaneous or posed pain. PEMF thus constitutes a large open-source and reliable set of dynamic pain expressions useful for designing experimental studies focused on pain processes.
... La evidencia más consistente relacionada con la disminución de la VPI en estas pacientes, muestra que principalmente, este enlentecimiento se asocia a componentes centrales de orden superior, como la memoria de trabajo (Seo et al., 2012), los procesos de inhibición (Veldhuijzen et al., 2012), la fluidez verbal (Leavitt & Katz, 2008 o el tiempo de planificación (Reyes del Paso et al., 2012). Además, a pesar de la existencia de un rendimiento conductual eficaz en este tipo de tareas, equiparado en algunas de ellas a participantes sin patología Peláez et al., 2019), se han observado mayores patrones de activación neural en los pacientes con fibromialgia (Fernandes-Magalhaes et al., 2022;, que han sido relacionados con una menor eficiencia y un mayor tiempo de respuesta a la hora de realizar distintas actividades Neubauer et al., 2002). Recientemente, algunos autores han relacionado estos déficits cognitivos, con la sintomatología afectiva característica de las pacientes (Galvez-Sánchez et al., 2018;Mercado et al., 2021). ...
Growing evidence indicates that cognitive slowness in fibromyalgia
patients constitutes one of the main concerns. This slowing, together
with the physical and affective symptomatology that characterises
them, significantly affects their quality of life. The main objective
of the present study was to design and apply a cognitive training
program to test its effects on the improvement of speed processing
information (SPI) in fibromyalgia, and how this improvement
influences other clinical symptoms in patients with fibromyalgia.
22 patients took part of this rehabilitation program. It consisted of 8
sessions including several types of tasks: cancellation, visual search,
association and verbal fluency tasks. Before starting the training
program, an individualized neuropsychological assessment of the
SPI was performed through standardized tests. Additionally, different
self-reported clinical questionnaires were applied to assess physical
(pain and fatigue) and affective (anxiety, depression, catastrophic
thoughts and impact of the disease on instrumental activities)
symptomatology. This evaluation was administered again once the
program was completed, as well as five months later, as a follow-up.
ANOVAs showed a significant improvement in all neuropsychological
assessment tests. In addition, both the depressive states and the
impact of the disease on the instrumental activities were improved.
These effects remained stable after five months. The application
of this neuropsychological rehabilitation program has shown to be
effective for improving SPI processes in patients with fibromyalgia.
Moreover, this improvement of IPV had a direct impact on depressive
symptomatology and instrumental activities of daily living, suggesting
a strong relationship between cognitive and affective symptoms in
the course of the disease.
... This painful stimulus was delivered via a mean beam diameter of 2.8 mm (density = 30.70 mJ/mm2) (see Peláez et al., 2019 for a more detailed description). Participants were asked to introduce their right hand into a box (only opened at the top) to prevent them from seeing the laser beam direction and to avoid distractions. ...
Background
One of the major cognitive deficits in fibromyalgia has been linked to the hypervigilance phenomenon. It is mainly reflected as a negative bias for allocating attentional resources towards both threatening and pain-related information. Although the interest in its study has recently grown, the neural temporal dynamics of the attentional bias in fibromyalgia still remains an open question.
Method
Fifty participants (25 fibromyalgia patients and 25 healthy control subjects) performed a dot-probe task. Two types of facial expressions (pain-related and neutral) were employed as signal stimuli. Then, as a target stimulus, a single dot replaced the location of one of these two faces. Event-related potentials (ERP) in response to facial expressions and target stimulation (i.e., dot) were recorded. Reaction time (RT) and accuracy measures in the experimental task were collected as behavioural outcomes.
Results
Temporal dynamics of brain electrical activity were analysed on two ERP components (P2 and N2a) sensitive to the facial expressions meaning. Pain-related faces elicited higher frontal P2 amplitudes than neutral faces for the whole sample. Interestingly, an interaction effect between group and facial expressions was also found showing that pain-related faces elicited enhanced P2 amplitudes (at fronto-central regions, in this case) compared to neutral faces only when the group of patients was considered. Furthermore, higher P2 amplitudes were observed in response to pain-related faces in patients with fibromyalgia compared to healthy control participants. Additionally, a shorter latency of P2 (at centro-parietal regions) was also detected for pain-related facial expressions compared to neutral faces. Regarding the amplitude of N2a, it was lower for patients as compared to the control group. Non-relevant effects of the target stimulation on the ERPs were found. However, patients with fibromyalgia exhibited slower RT to locate the single dot for incongruent trials as compared to congruent and neutral trials.
Conclusions
Data suggest the presence of an attentional bias in fibromyalgia that it would be followed by a deficit in the allocation of attentional resources to further process pain-related information. Altogether the current results suggest that attentional biases in fibromyalgia might be explained by automatic attentional mechanisms, which seem to be accompanied by an alteration of more strategic or controlled attentional components.
... This finding is important because in the current research we followed exactly the same experimental parameters for masking as previous research that reported subliminal findings. These included the presentation of the masked stimuli for 33.33 ms(Kiss & Eimer, 2008;Pegna, Landis & Khateb, 2008;Rule & Ambady, 2008;Pegna, Darque, Berrut & Khateb, 2011;Freeman, Stolier, Ingbretsen & Hehman, 2014;Parkinson, Garfinkel, Critchley, Dienes & Seth, 2017;Jiang, Wu, Saab, Xiao & Gao, 2018;Peláez, Ferrera, Barjola, Fernandes & Mercado, 2019; Gunther et al., 2020; Schütz, Güldenpenning, Kester & Schack, 2020), ...
The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emotions could be expressed via discretely different facial movements in different cultures due to the non-convergent social evolution that takes place in different geographical areas. This has prompted the consideration that own-culture emotional faces have distinct evolutionary important sociobiological value and can be processed automatically, and without conscious awareness. In this paper, we tested this hypothesis using backward masking. We showed, in two different experiments per country of origin, to participants in Britain, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore, backward masked own and other-culture emotional faces. We assessed detection and recognition performance, and self-reports for emotionality and familiarity. We presented thorough cross-cultural experimental evidence that when using Bayesian assessment of non-parametric receiver operating characteristics and hit-versus-miss detection and recognition response analyses, masked faces showing own cultural dialects of emotion were rated higher for emotionality and familiarity compared to other-culture emotional faces and that this effect involved conscious awareness.
... This finding is important because in the current research we followed exactly the same experimental parameters for masking as previous research that reported subliminal findings. These included the presentation of the masked stimuli for 33.33 ms(Kiss & Eimer, 2008;Pegna, Landis & Khateb, 2008;Rule & Ambady, 2008;Pegna, Darque, Berrut & Khateb, 2011;Freeman, Stolier, Ingbretsen & Hehman, 2014;Parkinson, Garfinkel, Critchley, Dienes & Seth, 2017;Jiang, Wu, Saab, Xiao & Gao, 2018;Peláez, Ferrera, Barjola, Fernandes & Mercado, 2019; Gunther et al., 2020; Schütz, Güldenpenning, Kester & Schack, 2020), ...
... Finally, the possible effect of medication on clinical symptoms (i.e., pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety, fear of pain, fear of movement and pain catastrophizing) within the fibromyalgia group was tested using one-way ANOVA, including patients using and not using particular medications using a previously reported method [51,52]. These control analyses were conducted including analgesics, benzodiazepines and antidepressants, as factors. ...
Previous research has shown a consistent association among genetic factors, psychological symptoms and pain associated with fibromyalgia. However, how these symptoms interact to moderate genetic factors in fibromyalgia has rarely been studied to date. The present research investigates whether psychological symptoms can moderate the effects of catechol-O-methyltransferase on pain and fatigue. A total of 108 women diagnosed with fibromyalgia and 77 healthy control participants took part in the study. Pain, fatigue, and psychological symptoms (anxiety, depression, pain catastrophizing, fear of pain and fear of movement) were measured by self-report questionnaires. Two types of statistical analyses were performed; the first was undertaken to explore the influences of COMT genotypes on clinical symptoms by comparing patients with fibromyalgia and healthy controls. In the second analysis, moderation analyses to explore the role of psychological symptoms as potential factors that moderate the relationship between pain/fatigue and COMT genotypes were performed. The main results indicated that patients carrying the Met/Met genotype reported significantly higher levels of fatigue than heterozygote carriers (i.e., Met/Val genotype) and higher levels of fatigue, but not significantly different, than Val homozygote carriers. Among patients with fibromyalgia carrying methionine alleles (i.e., Met/Met + Met/Val carriers), only those who scored high on medical fear of pain, experienced an intensified feeling of fatigue. Thus, the present research suggests that fear of pain, as a psychological symptom frequently described in fibromyalgia may act as a moderating factor in the relationship between the Met allele of the COMT gene and the increase or decrease in self-reported fatigue. Although further research with wider patient samples is needed to confirm the present findings, these results point out that the use of psychological interventions focused on affective symptomatology might be a useful tool to reduce the severity of fibromyalgia.
