Social and Cultural Neuroscience Lab - PSU

Another great original coverage of our most recent journal article, Zhang, L., Losin, E. A. R., Ashar, Y. K., Koban, L. & Wager, T. D. (2021). Gender biases in estimation of others' pain. Journal of Pain. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpain.2021.03.001
You can also find the press release here: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-04/uom-rig040621.php

Women's Pain It's not yet clear why people tend to underestimate women's pain, but they do. Men are offered painkillers; women, therapy.

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.

Redirecting

Check out our new paper in the Pain Medicine Journal where we found that Black patients had reduced pain and pain-related physiological responses when treated by a doctor of their own race in simulated clinical interactions.
Paper: Steven R Anderson, PhD, Morgan Gianola, MS, Jenna M Perry, Elizabeth A Reynolds Losin, PhD, Clinician–Patient Racial/Ethnic Concordance Influences Racial/Ethnic Minority Pain: Evidence from Simulated Clinical Interactions, Pain Medicine, pnaa258, https://doi.org/10.1093/pm/pnaa258
Press release: https://news.miami.edu/stories/2020/08/having-a-doctor-who-shares-the-same-race-may-ease-patients-angst.html

Having a doctor who shares the race of their patients may ease pain New research suggests that Black patients may have less pain and anxiety when treated by a physician of their own race.

A takeaway from Morgan's presentation during lab meeting:

Congratulations to Dr. Steven Anderson on his new postdoctoral position in Dr. Sean Mackey at Standford Systems Neuroscience and Pain Lab where he will be investigating the neurobiological correlates of social and contextual influences on chronic pain and opioid misuse.

Double the congratulations to our graduate student, Morgan Gianola!
He was awarded a "Critical Language Scholarship" to spend the summer in Florianopolis, Brazil focusing on intensive Portuguese language study but unfortunately due to the coronavirus outbreak, the program was canceled.
He was also selected as an alternate for a Boren Fellowship to conduct a cross-cultural neuroimaging study at Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Rio Grande Do Sul while also continuing his studies of the Portuguese language and learning Brazilian culture during the coming academic year.🎉 Granola Morgan

Congratulations to our very own Steven R. Anderson for not only successfully defending his doctoral thesis but for also receiving the Kirk R. Danhour Memorial Award from the Psychology Department for the Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience Division! This prestigious honor is awarded each spring to a graduating psychology graduate student in each division. Students are selected by the faculty based on outstanding academic performance, progress, and quality of research, leadership, social integration, involvement in departmental activities, and development of clinically-oriented skills. Steven has surely earned this award and continues to shine in our lab even during these times of uncertainty.

Check out our new collaborative paper, “Multiple Brain Networks Mediating Stimulus–Pain Relationships in Humans”, introducing a new high-dimensional mediation analysis technique to identify brain network-level mediators of pain. Brain mediators including areas outside the traditional pain-associated regions were identified as better predictors for pain ratings compared to previous neural metrics. It was published in Oxford’s Journal: Cerebral Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhaa048
Here is the Downloadable PDFhttps://static1.squarespace.com/static/54e5017de4b09eaf2d726fa2/t/5e82223ff4597579cf5fa0fc/1585586755366/Geuter-2020-Multiple-brain-networks-mediating-s.pdf

Check out our new paper, "Improving Practices for Selecting a Subset of Important Predictors in Psychology: An Application to Predicting Pain", in collaboration with fellow UM Psychology Professor, Sierra Bainter, and Tor Wager of Dartmouth College applying a variable selection technique not commonly used in psychology, stochastic search variable selection (SSVS), to look for the best sociocultural and brain predictors of pain published today in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS). https://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/WGREDTZG5DB9SV85XU3B/full