Increased Emotional-motivational Processing in Patients with Chronic Pain and Its Neural Correlates

"Substudy 1(b): All participants will perform one psychophysical task to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses simultaneously. The responses and the reaction times of chronic pain patients will be compared to those of healthy participants to characterize possible alterations in the patients (Substudy 1). Associative learning by monetary reinforcement will be implemented to diminish the aversiveness of the pain, which is assumed to be already increased in the patients.~Substudy 2: As in Substudy 1, all participants will perform one psychophysical task to assess sensory-discriminative and emotional-motivational pain responses simultaneously combined with MRI assessing the effects of the counterconditioning on fronto-striatal circuits."