Are You Listening? Facilitation of the Auditory Blink Response in People with Fibromyalgia.

The purpose of the current study was to determine whether auditory prepulse inhibition (PPI) and/or prepulse facilitation (PPF) were altered in people with fibromyalgia (FM) when compared with controls. Eyeblink responses were recorded from 29 females with FM and 27 controls, while they listened to 3 blocks of auditory stimuli that delivered pulses with either PPI or PPF. Using a linear mixed model, our main findings were that there was a GROUP*CONDITION interaction (F = 4.

The disappearing hand: vestibular stimulation does not improve hand localisation.

Background: Bodily self-consciousness depends on the coherent integration of sensory information. In addition to visual and somatosensory information processing, vestibular contributions have been proposed and investigated. Vestibular information seems especially important for self-location, but remains difficult to study.

Was That Painful or Nonpainful? The Sensation and Pain Rating Scale Performs Well in the Experimental Context.

In experiments on pain, participants are frequently exposed to nonpainful and painful stimuli; however, the conventional pain-rating scales lack a nonpainful range and a clear point of transition from nonpainful to painful events. The Sensation and Pain Rating Scale (SPARS) assesses the full stimulus intensity range, extending from no sensation (rating: -50) to worst pain imaginable (rating: +50), and it explicitly identifies pain threshold (rating: 0). Here, we tested the SPARS in 2 experiments by using laser heat stimuli to establish its stimulus-response characteristics (Experiment 1, N = 19, 13 stimulus intensities applied 26 times each across a 1-4 J range), and compared it to 0 to 100 scales that assess nonpainful (0: no sensation, 100: pain) and painful (0: no pain, 100: worst pain imaginable) events (Experiment 2, N = 7, 9 stimulus intensities applied 36 times each across a 1.

Waking EEG Cortical Markers of Chronic Pain and Sleepiness.

Objective: Spectral power analyses of EEG recordings are reported to distinguish the cortical activity of individuals with chronic pain from those of controls. Further study of these spectral patterns may provide a greater understanding of the processes associated with chronic pain, in addition to providing potential biometric markers of chronic pain for use in both clinical and research settings. However, sleep deprived groups have demonstrated similar characteristics in their spectral power characteristics, particularly in alpha bandwidth power activity.