The role of spontaneous vs. experimentally induced attentional strategies for the pain response to a single bout of exercise in healthy individuals.

Objectives: Exercise-induced pain and exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH) are well described phenomena involving physiological and cognitive mechanisms. Two experiments explored whether spontaneous and instructed mindful monitoring (MM) were associated with reduced exercise-induced pain and unpleasantness, and increased EIH compared with spontaneous and instructed thought suppression (TS) in pain-free individuals.

Methods: Eighty pain-free individuals participated in one of two randomized crossover experiments.

Cognitive Inhibition Correlates with Exercise-Induced Hypoalgesia After Aerobic Bicycling in Pain-Free Participants.

Purpose: Exercise-induced hypoalgesia (EIH) is the short-term reduction of pain sensitivity after a single bout of exercise. Descending pain inhibition has been proposed to at least partly underlie EIH. Cognitive inhibition is the ability to inhibit a pre-potent response and has in turn been associated with descending pain inhibition, as indexed by conditioned pain modulation.

Gray matter alteration associated with pain catastrophizing in patients 6 months after lumbar disk surgery: a voxel-based morphometry study.

Introduction: Pain catastrophizing (PC), the increased attention to harmful aspects of pain (magnification), and the belief of low controllability (helplessness) has been shown to be important in the maintenance of pain. A growing research on structural alterations in chronic pain revealed an association between PC and brain areas that are involved in affective and cognitive pain processing. However, little is known about a differential effect of the components magnification and helplessness.

Correction to: Mild Depression in Low Back Pain: the Interaction of Thought Suppression and Stress Plays a Role, Especially in Female Patients.

This article was updated to correct the author names. Family and given names are in the correct order.

Brain structural alterations associated with dysfunctional cognitive control of pain in patients with low back pain.

Background: Recent evidence has shown that chronic back pain (CBP) can lead to functional alterations in the circuitry underlying the cognitive control of pain. Thought suppression (TS) is a common type of cognitive control of pain. Previous research has shown that TS has paradoxical effects that may increase the awareness of pain.

Mild Depression in Low Back Pain: the Interaction of Thought Suppression and Stress Plays a Role, Especially in Female Patients.

Purpose: Mild depression has been shown as a precursor and as a consequence of low back pain, even in early phases of acute or subacute pain. Chronic daily life stress as well as dysfunctional pain-related cognitions such as thought suppression (TS) seem to play a role in the pain-depression cycle; however, the mechanisms of these associations are less understood. Experimentally induced TS, conceived as the attempt to directly suppress sensations such as pain, has been shown to paradoxically cause a delayed and non-volitional return of the suppressed thoughts and sensations and to increase affective distress.

[Emotion regulation and pain : Behavioral and neuronal correlates: a transdiagnostic approach].

Emotions and emotion regulation are of special importance in the perception and modulation of pain but the mechanisms underlying this reciprocal relationship remain unclear. The transdiagnostic model provides an approach to explain the link between pain and emotion regarding cognitive and neuronal mechanisms and aims to identify mutual processes, which are relevant for both. Structural and functional imaging studies of pain indicate the involvement of specific cortical and subcortical structures, which also play an important role in emotion regulation.