Issue Archive

A sketch of the overlap in the neural circuitry underlying psychological- and physical-pain

YU Wen-Jun^1,2, JIANG Jin-Xiang¹, Yang Li^1,*

¹School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China；²College of Education, Jinggangshan University, Ji’an 343009, China

Abstract

From the phenomenological point of view, pain can be classified into psychological-pain and physical-pain. Emerging evidence has shown that the psychological- and physical-pain recruit overlapping neural activity in regions associated with the affective component of pain, and share some common pain circuits, e.g., the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and the anterior insula (AI) play important roles in both psychological- and physical-pain. Therefore, understanding the way in which psychological- and physical-pain demonstrate either similarity or discrepancy may provide new insights into the relationship between the two types of experiences and potential targets for treating psychological suffering. This review summarizes research progress that has been obtained through experiments conducted in human and nonhuman animals to discuss the similarity, discrepancy and interaction between psychological- and physical-pain. The important next steps, e.g., uncovering the mechanisms underlying the overlap of psychological- and physical-pain; and whether chronic psychological-pain shapes brain plasticity as physical-pain does, are also discussed.

Key words: psychological pain

Received: 2017-04-27　　Accepted: 2017-08-30

Corresponding author: 杨莉　　E-mail: yang_li@m.scnu.edu.cn

DOI: 10.13294/j.aps.2017.0058

Citing This Article：

YU Wen-Jun, JIANG Jin-Xiang, Yang Li. A sketch of the overlap in the neural circuitry underlying psychological- and physical-pain. Acta Physiol Sin 2017; 69 (6): 830-842 (in Chinese with English abstract).