Changes in Affective Pain Processing in Human Volunteers

"All participants perform two psychophysical tasks to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses independently from each other.~In addition, in Substudy 1 an operant learning paradigm will be implement to dissociate these responses, increasing the sensory-discriminative pain responses compared to emotional-motivational pain responses by contingent monetary reinforcement or vice versa.~In Substudy 2, responses of chronic pain patients will be compared to those of healthy participants to characterize possible alterations and operant learning will be operationalized to decrease emotional-motivational pain responses, which are assumed to be already increased in the patients."

In Substudy 3 participants will perform a psychophysical task to assess metacognition in pain perception as an indicator of the cognitive-evaluative pain component.