The effects of pain experienced in daily life on memory are as follows:

A new study found that higher pain intensity was associated with decreased working memory and increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

The results of this study were published in the journal “Neuropsychologia”.

Previous studies have suggested that working memory pain-related disorders depend on the level of emotional distress of the individual. However, the specific brain and psychological factors that underlie the role of emotional distress in contributing to this relationship are not well understood.

However, this study also suggested that healthy, painful individuals also exhibit defects in working memory or cognitive processes that retain and manipulate information in a short period of time.

A study entitled “Modeling the Neurological and Self-Reporting Factors of Emotional Distress in the Relationship between Pain and Working Memory in Healthy Individuals” sought to address this gap in the literature.

This study was recently written by a PhD in Psychology from the University of Miami. Graduate students Stephen Anderson, Joanna Whitkin, Taylor Bolt and their advisor Elizabeth Rosin, director of the Institute of Social, Cultural and Neuroscience at Miami University. Maria Labre, Professor and Vice Chairman of the Faculty of Psychology. Claire Ashton James, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney.

The study used brain imaging and self-reported data published by the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a large-scale project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). This is a healthy human brain.

Brain imaging and self-reported data from 416 HCP participants were analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), a statistical method for modeling complex relationships between multiple variables.

In 228 participants who reported experiencing some degree of pain 7 days before the study, the authors found that higher pain intensity was a commonly used test of working memory for n-back task performance. We have found that it is directly related to the decline. In the n-back task, participants will see a series of characters and ask if the displayed characters have previously been displayed on some screens. The more screens in the sequence that participants are asked to recall, the more working memory is needed.

In addition, the authors found that higher pain intensity indirectly reduced working memory capacity through increased activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a specific area of ​​the center of the prefrontal cortex during n-back tasks. I found it to be related. vmPFC is an area of ​​the brain involved in pain, emotional distress, and cognition. Interestingly, the relationship between daily pain and brain activity in vmPFC in this study is similar to previous findings in patients with chronic pain.

“Healthy participants with low reported pain levels were found to have different levels of activity at vmPFC during n-back tasks compared to healthy participants who did not report pain. What should be noted is that this pattern of activity is more chronic pain than healthy patients who are exposed to pain manipulation in the laboratory, “Witkin said.

In contrast, the authors found that certain aspects of emotional distress reported by participants, such as anger, fear, and perceived stress, were not associated with working memory performance.

“Studies investigating the relationship between pain and cognition have typically focused on patients with chronic pain or study participants who have been given ly induced pain,” Anderson said.

“Pain is a common experience for many, but surprisingly little is known about how everyday pain experiences affect cognition,” Anderson added.

By using publicly available HCP datasets, researchers can include data from a much larger group of participants than is common in brain imaging studies due to the high cost of brain scans. I did.

This large sample allows the author to use structural equation modeling. This is a statistical technique that allows you to understand complex relationships between multiple variables and, in this case, helps explain how pain reduces working memory. The authors note that their findings have potential implications in both clinical and nonclinical settings.

“This study highlights the real effects that pain can have on the ability of even healthy people to think, and points out how this happens in the brain,” Losin said.

Follow more stories above Facebook And twitter

This story was published from the Wire Agency Feed without changing the text.