Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab
Dartmouth College
Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor in Neuroscience and co-leader of the Placebo Neuroimaging Consortium discusses a new meta-analysis that gives the most detailed look yet at the neuroscience of placebo effects! Read more at Dartmouth News
Continue reading “Study Provides Deep Dive on the Neuroscience of Placebo Effects”
Our new study, “Common and distinct neural representations of aversive somatic and visceral stimulation in healthy individuals” is published in Nature Communications.
Understanding the common and distinct brain representations underlying visceral and somatic pain is critical for assessing the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying different forms of pain. While previous studies have pointed to both commonalities and differences, this study identifies brain-wide commonalities that generalize across studies and types of painful stimulation, and brain network-level changes that are robust enough to permit brain-based classification of visceral versus somatic pain in independent participants.
This study shows that Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) responds robustly to both somatic and visceral aversive stimulation, and correlates with the subjective visceral pain experience. This identifies the NPS as a “common core pain system” that generalizes across pain types, including visceral stimulation. Additionally, the study suggests that, contrary to the NPS, existing signatures for nonpainful affective processes (negative emotion, social rejection, and vicarious pain) do not respond consistently to somatic nor visceral stimulation. This demonstrates the sensitivity of the NPS to pain versus other affective processes and implies that visceral pain does not activate more “emotional” brain patterns compared to somatic pain, as commonly assumed.
The WIRED magazine discusses the study where researchers showed a saline spray “treatment” reduced people’s emotional distress, even though the study subjects knew the spray wouldn’t do anything.
How might this work translate to the real world of mental health treatment?
Professor Tor Wager, a co-author of the study suspects that different “ingredients”—like reinforcing belief in the effectiveness of the placebo at a particular time—could make placebos more or less durable.
Access Nature Communications Article Here
Our new study “Empathic pain evoked by sensory and emotional-communicative cues share common and process-specific neural representation” published in eLife suggests that pain empathy evoked by observation of acute pain inflictions and facial expressions of pain share common and pain-specific neural representations. In addition to traditional univariate analyses, we employed extensive multivariate pattern analyses, which highlighted common representations centered largely on the bilateral mid-insula. In a further validation step, we showed that the domain-general vicarious pain pattern did not respond to non-painful high-arousal negative stimuli but predicted self-experienced thermal pain.
Continue reading “Empathic pain share common neural representations”
How On Earth | The KGNU Science Show
Interview with Dr. Tor Wager, the director of Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Dartmouth College on KGNU Radio Station on The Neuroscience of Pain.
“Clinician-patient movement synchrony mediates social group effects on interpersonal trust and perceived pain”
Our new study published in the Journal of Pain suggests that interpersonal movement synchrony between the patient and the provider could mediate concordance effects on trust in the clinician and reduce the pain perceived by the patient. Continue reading “Can interpersonal synchrony enhance patient-provider interaction outcomes?”
“Discovery and validation of biomarkers to aid the development of safe and effective pain therapeutics: challenges & opportunities”
In 2018, the NIH-led Discovery and Validation of Biomarkers to Develop Non-Addictive Therapeutics for Pain workshop convened scientific leaders from academia, industry, government and patient advocacy groups to discuss progress, challenges, gaps and ideas to facilitate the development of biomarkers and end points for pain. The outcomes of this workshop are outlined in this Consensus Statement.
“Inferring the infant pain experience: a translational fMRI-based signature study”
This study translates validated adult pain fMRI brain signatures to a nonverbal patient population in which the assessment and management of pain presents a significant clinical challenge. Here we demonstrate that the basic encoding of the sensory discriminative aspects of pain, as represented by the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS), occurs in both adults and infants, whereas higher-level cognitive modulation of pain, represented by the Stimulus Intensity Independent Pain Signature (SIIPS1) is only present in adults and not observed in infants. This work allows us to use quantitative fMRI observations to make stronger inferences related to pain experience in nonverbal infants. Continue reading “A novel approach that could advance the discovery and assessment of analgesic interventions in infancy”
Computational Satellite @ Society of Biological Psychiatry 2020 Talks by Bassett, Mourao-Miranda & Wager
Access tutorials and cutting-edge research talks by Dani Bassett, Janaina Mourao-Miranda, and Tor Wager here!
“Behavioral and neural signatures of working memory in childhood”
The paper establishes associations between working memory, cognitive abilities, and functional MRI activation in data from over 4,000 9–10-year-olds enrolled in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, an ongoing longitudinal study in the United States. Behavioral analyses reveal robust relationships between working memory, short-term memory, language skills, and fluid intelligence. Continue reading “New Journal of Neuroscience Publication”
The new study, “Multiple Brain Networks Mediating Stimulus–Pain Relationships in Humans”, published in the journal of Cerebral Cortex suggests a new high-dimensional mediation analysis technique to estimate distributed, network-level patterns that formally mediate the relationship between stimulus intensity and pain.