Repeated exposure to aversive sensations differentially affects neural gating and bodily perception.

Habituation to bodily sensations is highly relevant for the experience of chronic bodily symptoms, but the neural mechanisms behind diminished habituation are currently unclear. One potentially relevant mechanism is neural gating (NG), reflected as the short-term suppression of cortical responses to redundant stimuli. We investigated the effects of repeated exposure to aversive sensations on NG and subjective perception in 91 healthy adults, by measuring their NG of respiratory and electrocutaneous stimuli using electroencephalography during two sessions separated by one week, in addition to their self-report of intensity and unpleasantness of the sensations.

Conditioned fear selectively increases the perception and neural processing of respiratory stimuli relative to somatosensory stimuli.

Interoception is crucial to the experience of bodily complaints in chronic conditions. Fear can distort the perception of sensations like breathlessness and pain, yet few studies investigated the effects of conditioned fear on both self-report and neural processing of these sensations. In the current study, we conditioned fear of neutral female faces in healthy adults, pairing certain faces (CS+) with an aversive scream.

Learned Symptom-Specific Fear Toward a Visceral Sensation and Its Impact on Perceptual Habituation.

Objective: Impaired habituation of bodily sensations has been suggested as a contributing factor to chronic pain. We examined in healthy volunteers the influence of fear learning toward a nonpainful sensation in the esophagus on the perceptual habituation of this sensation.

Methods: In a homoreflexive fear learning paradigm, nonpainful electrical sensations in the esophagus were used as a conditioned stimulus (CS).

Disease Acceptance, but not Perceived Control, is Uniquely Associated with Inflammatory Bowel Disease-related Disability.

Background And Aims: Disability, an important aspect of disease burden in patients with inflammatory bowel disease [IBD], has been suggested as a valuable clinical endpoint. We aimed to investigate how disease acceptance and perceived control, two psychological predictors of subjective health, are associated with IBD-related disability.

Methods: In this cross-sectional study, adult IBD patients from the University Hospitals Leuven received a survey with questions about clinical and demographic characteristics, disease acceptance and perceived control [Subjective Health Experience model questionnaire], and IBD-related disability [IBD Disk].

Brain mediators of negative affect-induced physical symptom reporting in patients with functional somatic syndromes.

Functional somatic syndromes (FSS) include fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and others. In FSS patients, merely viewing negative affective pictures can elicit increased physical symptoms. Our aim was to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying such negative affect-induced physical symptoms in FSS patients.