Pain modulates early sensory brain responses to task ‐irrelevant emotional faces

ConclusionsOur results suggest that pain alters both featural (P1) and structural face-sensitive (N170) visual encoding of emotional faces, even when the faces are irrelevant to the task. While the effect of pain on initial feature encoding seemed to be disruptive and specific to happy faces, later processing stages showed long-lasting and increased activity for both sad and happy emotional faces.SignificanceThe observed alterations in face perception due to pain may have consequences for real-life interactions, as fast and automatic encoding of facial emotions is important for social interactions.

Source: European Journal of Pain - February 20, 2023 Category: Anesthesiology Authors: Qianru Xu, Chaoxiong Ye, Xueqiao Li, Guoying Zhao, Piia Astikainen Tags: ORIGINAL ARTICLE Source Type: research