Spatiotemporal integration of contextual and sensory information within the cortical hierarchy in human pain experience.

Pain is not a mere reflection of noxious input. Rather, it is constructed through the dynamic integration of current predictions with incoming sensory input. However, the temporal dynamics of the behavioral and neural processes underpinning this integration remain elusive.

Language Dominance and Cultural Identity Predict Variation in Self-Reported Personality in English and Spanish Among Hispanic/Latino Bilingual Adults.

Language is a fundamental aspect of human culture that influences cognitive and perceptual processes. Prior evidence demonstrates personality self-report can vary across multilingual persons' language contexts. We assessed how cultural identification, language dominance, or both dynamically influence bilingual respondents' self-conception, via self-reported personality, across English and Spanish contexts.

Social Determinants and Consequences of Pain: Toward Multilevel, Intersectional, and Life Course Perspectives.

Despite wide endorsement of a biopsychosocial framework for pain, social aspects of pain remain rarely addressed in the context of pain prevention and management. In this review, we aim to 1) examine the broad scope of social determinants and consequences of pain and their interactions across multiple levels of organization, and 2) provide a framework synthesizing existing concepts and potential areas for future work on social aspects of pain, drawing upon socioecological, intersectional, and life course approaches. Integrating interdisciplinary theory and evidence, we outline pathways through which multilevel social factors and pain may affect each other over time.

Does pain hurt more in Spanish? The neurobiology of pain among Spanish-English bilingual adults.

We previously found Spanish-English bilingual adults reported higher pain intensity when exposed to painful heat in the language of their stronger cultural orientation. Here, we elucidate brain systems involved in language-driven alterations in pain responses. During separate English- and Spanish-speaking fMRI scanning runs, 39 (21 female) bilingual adults rated painful heat intermixed between culturally evocative images and completed sentence reading tasks.

A dorsomedial prefrontal cortex-based dynamic functional connectivity model of rumination.

Rumination is a cognitive style characterized by repetitive thoughts about one's negative internal states and is a common symptom of depression. Previous studies have linked trait rumination to alterations in the default mode network, but predictive brain markers of rumination are lacking. Here, we adopt a predictive modeling approach to develop a neuroimaging marker of rumination based on the variance of dynamic resting-state functional connectivity and test it across 5 diverse subclinical and clinical samples (total n = 288).

Doctor trustworthiness influences pain and its neural correlates in virtual medical interactions.

Trust is an important component of the doctor-patient relationship and is associated with improved patient satisfaction and health outcomes. Previously, we reported that patient feelings of trust and similarity toward their clinician predicted reductions in evoked pain in response to painful heat stimulations. In the present study, we investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this effect.

A multistudy analysis reveals that evoked pain intensity representation is distributed across brain systems.

Information is coded in the brain at multiple anatomical scales: locally, distributed across regions and networks, and globally. For pain, the scale of representation has not been formally tested, and quantitative comparisons of pain representations across regions and networks are lacking. In this multistudy analysis of 376 participants across 11 studies, we compared multivariate predictive models to investigate the spatial scale and location of evoked heat pain intensity representation.

Effect sizes and test-retest reliability of the fMRI-based neurologic pain signature.

Identifying biomarkers that predict mental states with large effect sizes and high test-retest reliability is a growing priority for fMRI research. We examined a well-established multivariate brain measure that tracks pain induced by nociceptive input, the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS). In N = 295 participants across eight studies, NPS responses showed a very large effect size in predicting within-person single-trial pain reports (d = 1.

Variation is the Norm: Brain State Dynamics Evoked By Emotional Video Clips.

For the last several decades, emotion research has attempted to identify a "biomarker" or consistent pattern of brain activity to characterize a single category of emotion (e.g., fear) that will remain consistent across all instances of that category, regardless of individual and context.

Expressive suppression to pain in others reduces negative emotion but not vicarious pain in the observer.

Although there are situations where it may be appropriate to reduce one's emotional response to the pain of others, the impact of an observer's emotional expressivity on their response to pain in others is still not well understood. In the present study, we examined how the emotion regulation strategy expressive suppression influences responses to pain in others. Based on prior research findings on expressive suppression and pain empathy, we hypothesized that expressive suppression to pain expression faces would reduce neural representations of negative emotion, vicarious pain, or both.

Gender Biases in Estimation of Others' Pain.

Caregiving and other interpersonal interactions often require accurate perception of others' pain from nonverbal cues, but perceivers may be subject to systematic biases based on gender, race, and other contextual factors. Such biases could contribute to systematic under-recognition and undertreatment of pain. In 2 experiments, we studied the impact of perceived patient sex on lay perceivers' pain estimates and treatment recommendations.

Modeling neural and self-reported factors of affective distress in the relationship between pain and working memory in healthy individuals.

The relationship between pain and cognition has primarily been investigated in patients with chronic pain and healthy participants undergoing experimental pain. Recently, there has been interest in understanding the disruptive effects of non-experimental pain in otherwise healthy individuals. Recent studies suggest that healthy individuals reporting pain also demonstrate decrements in working memory (WM) performance, however factors contributing to this relationship remain poorly understood.

Selection and Characterization of Cultural Priming Stimuli for the Activation of Spanish and English Cultural Mindsets among Hispanic/Latino Bilinguals in the United States.

Cultural priming studies frequently employ non-validated, stereotypical images. Here, we select images to separately evoke two cultural mindsets: Hispanic and US-American. Spanish-English bilinguals identifying as Hispanic/Latino (N=149) rated 50 images online for their cultural and emotional evocation.

Clinician-Patient Racial/Ethnic Concordance Influences Racial/Ethnic Minority Pain: Evidence from Simulated Clinical Interactions.

Objective: Racial and ethnic minorities in the United States report higher levels of both clinical and experimental pain, yet frequently receive inadequate pain treatment. Although these disparities are well documented, their underlying causes remain largely unknown. Evidence from social psychological and health disparities research suggests that clinician-patient racial/ethnic concordance may improve minority patient health outcomes.

Clinician-Patient Movement Synchrony Mediates Social Group Effects on Interpersonal Trust and Perceived Pain.

Pain is an unfortunate consequence of many medical procedures, which in some patients becomes chronic and debilitating. Among the factors affecting medical pain, clinician-patient (C-P) similarity and nonverbal communication are particularly important for pain diagnosis and treatment. Participants (N = 66) were randomly assigned to clinician and patient roles and were grouped into C-P dyads.

Multiple Brain Networks Mediating Stimulus-Pain Relationships in Humans.

The brain transforms nociceptive input into a complex pain experience comprised of sensory, affective, motivational, and cognitive components. However, it is still unclear how pain arises from nociceptive input and which brain networks coordinate to generate pain experiences. We introduce a new high-dimensional mediation analysis technique to estimate distributed, network-level patterns that formally mediate the relationship between stimulus intensity and pain.

Author Correction: Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Neural and sociocultural mediators of ethnic differences in pain.

Understanding ethnic differences in pain is important for addressing disparities in pain care. A common belief is that African Americans are hyposensitive to pain compared to Whites, but African Americans show increased pain sensitivity in clinical and laboratory settings. The neurobiological mechanisms underlying these differences are unknown.

Generalizable representations of pain, cognitive control, and negative emotion in medial frontal cortex.

The medial frontal cortex, including anterior midcingulate cortex, has been linked to multiple psychological domains, including cognitive control, pain, and emotion. However, it is unclear whether this region encodes representations of these domains that are generalizable across studies and subdomains. Additionally, if there are generalizable representations, do they reflect a single underlying process shared across domains or multiple domain-specific processes? We decomposed multivariate patterns of functional MRI activity from 270 participants across 18 studies into study-specific, subdomain-specific, and domain-specific components and identified latent multivariate representations that generalized across subdomains but were specific to each domain.

Feelings of Clinician-Patient Similarity and Trust Influence Pain: Evidence From Simulated Clinical Interactions.

Unlabelled: Pain is influenced by many factors other than external sources of tissue damage. Among these, the clinician-patient relationship is particularly important for pain diagnosis and treatment. However, the effects of the clinician-patient relationship on pain remain underexamined.

Group-regularized individual prediction: theory and application to pain.

Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) has become an important tool for identifying brain representations of psychological processes and clinical outcomes using fMRI and related methods. Such methods can be used to predict or 'decode' psychological states in individual subjects. Single-subject MVPA approaches, however, are limited by the amount and quality of individual-subject data.

Brain and psychological mediators of imitation: sociocultural versus physical traits.

The acquisition of cultural beliefs and practices is fundamental to human societies. The psychological and neural mechanisms underlying cultural acquisition, however, are not well understood. Here we used brain imaging to investigate how others' physical and sociocultural attributes may influence imitative learning, a critical component of cultural acquisition.

Neural processing of race during imitation: self-similarity versus social status.

People preferentially imitate others who are similar to them or have high social status. Such imitative biases are thought to have evolved because they increase the efficiency of cultural acquisition. Here we focused on distinguishing between self-similarity and social status as two candidate mechanisms underlying neural responses to a person's race during imitation.