New Collaborative Paper Published Featuring UM CBN Ph.D. Graduates
/Check out our new paper, “Modeling neural and self-reported factors of affective distress in the relationship between pain and working memory in healthy individuals,” by recent graduate students Steven Anderson, Ph.D., and Joanna Witkin, Ph.D., in collaboration with Taylor Bolt, Ph.D., Claire Ashton-James, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Losin, Ph.D. The article was published in Neuropsychologia, an international journal in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. The authors analyzed open-science neuroimaging and self-report data from the Human Connectome Project (HCP). The study analyzed data from healthy individuals experiencing pain within the past seven days. The authors found that higher pain intensity in the past seven days was associated with reduced working memory performance and increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a brain region involved in pain, affective distress, and cognition. The authors also found that healthy participants with pain had different levels of activity in the vmPFC during the working memory task than healthy participants who did not report pain. Interestingly, this activity pattern was more similar to patients with chronic pain than healthy patients exposed to pain manipulations in a laboratory.
