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Pleasure & Pain & Sadness & Disgust

46 important questions on Pleasure & Pain & Sadness & Disgust

What is the conclusion Heath made about the influence of the mesolimbic pathways in psychiatric patients?

Psychiatric patients experience desires:
- Sexual
- Something coming
- Arousal
- Alert

Rat robots: Where was the stimulation & why was this remarkable?

Stimulation of
- Somatosensory cortex: Virtual touch left/right whisker --> Directional cue

- Mesolimbic pathway: reward for left/right/forward

Remarkable:- Rat's were conctroller without actually influencing the motor pathways --> Mesolimibic pathway can influence behavior?

What is the function of the mesocortical pathway? In what disfunction is it compromised?

Executive functions: Shizofrenia

What is the function of the nigrostriatal pathway? In what disfunction is is compromised?

Motor & learning pathway: Parkinsons§

If we block dopamine receptors, what behavior can we see? If we destroy dopamine pathways what do we see?

Block receptors: Reduction in reward-seeking behavior
- Inlcuding self-seeking behavior

Destruction of dopamine pathways:
- No more reward-seeking behavior (dieing of starvation)

Wanting, Liking & Learning phases could also be described as: (Dynamic pleasure cycle)

Prediction
Evaluation
Prediction error

What were the findings of Kent Berridge on dissociating liking & wanting?

- Patients in her experiment didnt say they felt pleasant, but experienced sexual desire, erotic feelings of thirst (often without satisfaction)

So maybe dopamine = mediator of desire and not pleasure

What are the differences in behavioral measures of liking & wanting?

Liking vs disliking: Mouth & tongue movements, lip-licking in response to taste
- Taste-reactivitiy test: Pleasure

Wanting: effort to get a reward, amount of approach behavior & eating behavior
- Eating: Desire or incentive salience (motivation)

What is the influence of DAT-knockdown & what does it say about dopamine?

DAT-knockdown --> gene that inhibites the dopamine from getting 'transported' away --> More dopamine in the mutant mice

Increased wanting but not liking
- More effort to get reward (less distraction)
- Not more lip licking

If we were to block dopamine transmission (blocking dopamine production or receptors) in rats. What behavioral changes will we see? And what behavioral changes will we not see?

Less dopamine = less wanting (not less liking)
- Reduces effort & approach behavior
- Not less lip-licking (liking)

Mice love sucrose. They are now injected with enkephalin (DAMGO) which activates the μ-opioid receptor. What happens behaviourally & where in the brain is there more activation?

Increase of liking responses to sucrose (lip licking etc.)

More active:
- Medial shell of nucleus accumbens
- Ventral pallidum

What are (globally) the brain area's involved in liking?

Orbitofrontal cortex
Thalamus

Nucleus accumbens shell
Ventral Pallidum
Parabrachial nucleus

How were orbitofrontal pleasures measured using orgasm?

4 conditions:
- rest: Resting state
- Fake orgasm: clitoral stimulation & orgasm-like movement
- Stimulation: clitoral stimulation without orgasm & movement
- Orgasm: self-reported orgasm by clitoral stimulation (& rectal pressure measurement as objective measurement)

Result:- OFC strong decrease in activity for succesful orgasm (men show similar effects)

What were the findings of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex & pleasure?

Food-Pleasure:
- Pleasantness rating correlated with OFC activity
- OFC modulated by selective satiety

Orgasm:- Strong decrease in OFC activity for succesful orgasm

What are the 3 components of pain?

Ik ben pijn beu.

- Bodily sensations (sensory): tissue damage, heat cold, pressure
- Experience of threat (cognitive)
- Unpleasantness (affective): Subjective feeling of negative emotion

What comparison shows pain is the opposite of pleasure? (& what is different?)

1. Wanting - not wanting: Pain anticipation is motivating
2. Liking - not liking: conscious experience of pain
3. Learning - learning: Pain is still a powerful learning signal

But: Pain can be more persistant than pleasure

How can we measure empathy for pain? What are the results?

Felt pain vs empathy:
- Felt pain: pain received in fMRI through electrodes
- Empathy: Pain perceived by other person outside of scanner (partner)

Cue-based paradigms: Arrow indicates who gets pain & how much
Picture-based paradigms: Picture indicates the same

Results- Overlapping cortical pain matrix for pain & empathy for pain
- Affective pain circuits: Anterior cingulate cortex & Anterior insula light up

How can we measure pain of social rejection and what were the results?

1. Cyberball paradigm:
- Social exclusion > social inclusion = aCC & anterior insula activity

2. Unwanted breakup paradigm
- Inclusion: think positive experience with friend
- Exclusion: Think about feelings during break up
- Somatic: Hot (pain) or warm (non-painful) stimulus to forearm

Results unwanted breakup:- Overlap of social rejection & physical pain matrix
- Insula, dACC & thalamus

BUT: Recent findings- Different distributed patterns of activity in dACC (social vs physical)
- Distinct neural codes!

What do we know about the effect of placebo in treatment?

- Effective for pain, Parkinson's, heart problems & mental diseases
- Potentiates the effect of active treatments (painkillers)

What did Levine & Gordon show about the power of the placebo effect (oral surgery)?

Pain following oral surgery.
- Open Salie injection equals hidden injection of 8mg
- Only 12 mg of hidden morphine is more effective than open saline placebo
- Naloxone (opioid antagonist) blocks placebo effect --> opioid mechanisms

How are medicine normally researched when taking into accound the placebo effect?

Drug administration in clinical practice
- Drug + Expectation = Therapeutic outcome
- Pharmacodynamic + Psychological = Therapeutic outcome

Placebo administration in placebo-controlled trials (drug left out)
- Expectation = Therapeutic outcome
- Psychological = therapeutic outcome

Difference = Pharmacodynamic effect

But this does not isolate the true effect of the drug!

What is a hidden administration in the open-hidden design?

Drug without expectations that come with administering drug = therapeutic outcome

What can a open-hidden paradigm show about placebo's?

Show the difference between:
- Drugs that depend on placebo effect (Metamizole)

- Drugs that are genuine but potentiated by placebo effect

How can a placebo effect arise?

A lot of different mechanisms.
- Psychological
- Conditioning
- Verbal cues
- Place cues
- Social cues
- Treatment cues
- Outcome expectancies
- Explicit memories
- Pre-cognitive associations
etc
etc

What do placebo & opioid agonist have in common?

They activate the same network:
- Affective pain matrix
- Orbitofrontal cortex
- Brainstem area's

What did fMRI studies show of placebo pain reduction & brain area's?

Anticipation: Increased activation of endogenous opioid system

Pain reduction (due to placebo): less activity in affective pain matrix

In what brain systems do pain & pleasure have overlap?

μ-opioid system overlap

Pleasure + pain = less pleasure
Pleasure + (pain & μ-opioid receptor antagonist) = same pleasure

Pain + pleasure = same pain
Pain + (pleasure & μ-opioid receptor antagonist = same pain

What happens when there is low phasic responsiveness?

There is increased tonic dopamine.
- Decreased phasic dopamine signal: Spikes can't be as big.

Behaviorally:
- Pain & stress symptoms
- Depression & chronic pain

How can we build 5 basic emotions purely from pleasure & pain?

Fear: Anticipation of pain
Disgust: Avoiding pain of unpleasant taste
Anger: Inability to follow desired path
Sadness: expression of pain
Joy: Experience of pleasure

What is affective blindsight?

Blind hemifield due to unilateral visual cortex lesion.
- Still pupil & face muscle responses to fearful stimuli despite subjective blindness.

Might be due to subcortical pathway
- Retina --> Superior colliculus --> pulvinar --> Amygdala

But the existence of this pathway has not been demonstrated in primates§

What happens in bilateral destruction of the amygdala? (patient SM)

Experiences less or even no fear.
- Scary movies
- Snakes or spiders
- Haunted house

Severe recognition impairments to fearful regions: not attending eye regions.
- When instructed to look at eyes --> SM could recognize fear normally

According to neuroimaging studies; is the amygdala fear-specific?

No
- Also activation in other emotions
- General role in emotional evaluation of novel/uncertain/unusual stimuli?

Fear might be mostly more novel/uncertain/unusual in stimuli

Kennen we disgust characteristics & behavior & responses?

Ja slide 200

How are fear & disgust opposites?

Fear:
- Sensory vigilance --> increase sensory exposure --> Detect source of threat

Disgust
- Sensory rejection --> Diminish sensory exposure --> avoid contaminants
Opposite appearance of fearful & disgusted faces
Opposite facial actions for posing fear & disgust
- Fear: Raised brows, Increased eye aperture, long nose
- Disgust: Lowered brow, decreased eye aperture, nose compression

What is the difference in sensory exposure between fear & disgust?

When posing fear vs when posing disgust:
- Larger visual field vs smaller
- Faster eye movements during target selection vs slower
-Increase in air velocity vs less

(Darwin?)

What are the neural correlates of fear?

Amygdala
- Fearful facial expressions
- Fear conditioning

What are the neural correlates of disgust?

Basal Ganglia: Disgusted facial expressions
Insula: Disgusted facial expressions

In what processes is the insula active?

Disgust
Pain
Interoception

What are Chapman's disgust categories?

Distaste: Upleasant tastes (Avoid toxins)

Physical disgust
- Core disgust: Feces, vomit rats etc. (Avoid infection through mouth)
- Blood-injury: Deformaties, blood, injusties (avoid infection)
- Interpersonal: contact with diseased or unfamiliar individuals (avoid infection)
-Sexual: Wrong sex, old/young, wrong species (Avoid reducing reproductive fitness)

Moral disgust: Violation of social/moral norms (avoid bad interaction partners)

What are the findings on moral disgust?

Unfair treatment elicits disgust (unfair offers in game)
- Facial reaction aswell?
- Moral judgement can be influenced by taste (distaste = more moral disgust)

Weten we alles van anger characteristic & behavior

Ja slide 221

What did anger provocation in fMRI show?

Left doral anterior cingulate correlations.
- Aggresive peronality scores
- Post-experimental anger quesionaires

Why did Paul Whalen have an hypothesis that the amygdala might also be active for angry faces & not just fearful faces?

- Both negative valence (detected by basolateral complex of amygdala)
- Differ in information value: Anger = threat is known. Fear = threat is unknown

- Anger clearer negative --> Appropriate response initiated via basolateral complex of amygdala --> Lower overall activity

- Fearful more depended on context & recruits central nucleus & connections --> Higher overall activity

What are arguments for & against the statement that we use crying as a distress signal?

Pro
-Infants cry when separated from mother or hungry

Against
- Adults cry when alone

How did Gelstein et al research the effects of tears? (chemosignal) What were the results?

Take negative-emotion tears from woman.
Sniffing tears vs saline (fake)

Results: sniffing female tears:- Testosterone increase in male saliva
- Reduces sexual arousal in men
- Reduces activity in response to a sad movie in sexual-arousal part of hypothalamus

Is there a sadness center?

No, lot of brain regions involved but activity in ACC
- Just like empathy for pain & social rejection

The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:

Social Affective Neurosciences

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