TY - JOUR T1 - Emotional Modulation of Pain: Is It the Sensation or What We Recall? JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 11454 LP - 11461 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2260-06.2006 VL - 26 IS - 44 AU - Fabio Godinho AU - Michel Magnin AU - Maud Frot AU - Caroline Perchet AU - Luis Garcia-Larrea Y1 - 2006/11/01 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/44/11454.abstract N2 - Emotions modulate pain perception, although the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon remain unclear. In this study, we show that intensity reports significantly increased when painful stimuli were concomitant to images showing human pain, whereas pictures with identical emotional values but without somatic content failed to modulate pain. Early somatosensory responses (<200 ms) remained unmodified by emotions. Conversely, late responses showed a significant enhancement associated with increased pain ratings, localized to the right prefrontal, right temporo-occipital junction, and right temporal pole. In contrast to selective attention, which enhances pain ratings by increasing sensory gain, emotions triggered by seeing other people's pain did not alter processing in SI–SII (primary and second somatosensory areas), but may have biased the transfer to, and the representation of pain in short-term memory buffers (prefrontal), as well as the affective assignment to this representation (temporal pole). Memory encoding and recall, rather than sensory processing, appear to be modulated by empathy with others' physical suffering. ER -