title: Reward Enhances Pain Discrimination in Humans
creator: Becker, Susanne
creator: Löffler, Martin
creator: Seymour, Ben
subject: 150
subject: 150 Psychology
description: The notion that reward inhibits pain is a well-supported observation in both humans and animals, allowing suppression of pain reflexes to acquired rewarding stimuli. However, a blanket inhibition of pain by reward would also impair pain discrimination. In contrast, early counterconditioning experiments implied that reward might actually spare pain  discrimination. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether discriminative performance was enhanced or inhibited by reward. We found in adult human volunteers (N = 25) that pain-based discriminative ability is actually enhanced by reward, especially when reward is directly contingent on discriminative performance. Drift-diffusion modeling  shows that this relates to an augmentation of the underlying sensory signal strength and is not merely an effect of decision bias. This enhancement of sensory-discriminative pain-information processing suggests that whereas reward can promote reward-acquiring behavior by inhibition of pain in some circumstances, it can also facilitate important discriminative information of the sensory input when necessary.
publisher: Sage (Publ.)
date: 2020
type: Article
type: info:eu-repo/semantics/article
type: NonPeerReviewed
format: application/pdf
identifier: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserverhttps://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29137/1/10.1177_0956797620939588.pdf
identifier: DOI:10.11588/heidok.00029137
identifier: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620939588
identifier: urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-291375
identifier:   Becker, Susanne ; Löffler, Martin ; Seymour, Ben  (2020) Reward Enhances Pain Discrimination in Humans.  Psychological Science, 31 (9).  pp. 1191-1199.  ISSN 0956-7976 (Druck-Ausg.), 1467-9280 (Online-Ausg.)     
relation: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/29137/
rights: info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/help/license_urhg.html
language: eng