The Library
Relative valuation of pain in human orbitofrontal cortex
Tools
Tools
Tools
Winston, Joel S., Vlaev, Ivo, Seymour, Ben, Chater, Nick and Dolan, R. J. (2014) Relative valuation of pain in human orbitofrontal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, Volume 34 (Number 44). pp. 14526-14535. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1706-14.2014 ISSN 0270-6474.
|
PDF
WRAP_14526.full.pdf - Published Version - Requires a PDF viewer. Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (834Kb) | Preview |
Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1706-14.2014
Abstract
The valuation of health-related states, including pain, is a critical issue in clinical practice, health economics, and pain neuroscience. Surprisingly the monetary value people associate with pain is highly context-dependent, with participants willing to pay more to avoid medium-level pain when presented in a context of low-intensity, rather than high-intensity, pain. Here, we ask whether context impacts upon the neural representation of pain itself, or alternatively the transformation of pain into valuation-driven behavior. While undergoing fMRI, human participants declared how much money they would be willing to pay to avoid repeated instances of painful cutaneous electrical stimuli delivered to the foot. We also implemented a contextual manipulation that involved presenting medium-level painful stimuli in blocks with either low- or high-level stimuli. We found no evidence of context-dependent activity within a conventional โpain matrix,โ where pain-evoked activity reflected absolute stimulus intensity. By contrast, in right lateral orbitofrontal cortex, a strong contextual dependency was evident, and here activity tracked the contextual rank of the pain. The findings are in keeping with an architecture where an absolute pain valuation system and a rank-dependent system interact to influence willing to pay to avoid pain, with context impacting value-based behavior high in a processing hierarchy. This segregated processing hints that distinct neural representations reflect sensory aspects of pain and components that are less directly nociceptive whose integration also guides pain-related actions. A dominance of the latter might account for puzzling phenomena seen in somatization disorders where perceived pain is a dominant driver of behavior.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Subjects: | Q Science > QP Physiology R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine |
||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Behavioural Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Neuroeconomics, Pain -- Economic aspects, Medical economics | ||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Journal of Neuroscience | ||||||
| Publisher: | Society for Neuroscience | ||||||
| ISSN: | 0270-6474 | ||||||
| Official Date: | 29 October 2014 | ||||||
| Dates: |
|
||||||
| Volume: | Volume 34 | ||||||
| Number: | Number 44 | ||||||
| Number of Pages: | 9 | ||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 14526-14535 | ||||||
| DOI: | 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1706-14.2014 | ||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
| Date of first compliant deposit: | 28 December 2015 | ||||||
| Date of first compliant Open Access: | 28 December 2015 | ||||||
| Funder: | Wellcome Trust (London, England), European Research Council (ERC), Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) (ESRC), Leverhulme Trust (LT), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Templeton Foundation | ||||||
| Grant number: | 091593/Z/10/Z (WT), 295917-RATIONALITY (ERC), RP2012-V-022 (LT), EP/ K039830/1 (RCUK) |
Request changes or add full text files to a record
Repository staff actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
Downloads
Downloads per month over past year
