Multisensory Integration and Pain Perception

Wake Forest University (WFU)

Status: Withdrawn

Conditions: Regulation, Self; Pain

Treatments: Behavioral: Positive reappraisal; Behavioral: Mindfulness meditation

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT03471689

IRB00046662

Details and patient eligibility

About

Pain is a predominant disruption of well-being among humans. Feeling pain is a multimodal sensory experience where information is collected and processed from various senses such as sight and touch. Because pain is complex, variable, and experienced differently by each individual, finding more accessible and practical treatments for pain are necessary. Mindfulness meditation (MM) aims to reduce pain by directing focus to perceive thoughts through non-judgmental awareness. Positive reappraisal (PR) is a possible cognitive pain treatment that focuses on changing the meaning of stressful or negative events into positive, benign, valuable, or beneficial. When a stressful event, such as experiencing pain, is positively reappraised, the individual recognizes and engages with the feeling of stress produced by the event and intentionally looks for benefits that change the feeling from negative to positive. The focus of this study is to examine the effect of different cognitive techniques on multimodal innocuous and noxious stimuli. Visual and tactile noxious stimuli will be administered to determine how visual cue integrate to form and modulate the subjective experience of pain. The study team postulates that mindfulness meditation and positive reappraisal will significantly reduce pain in response to multimodal stimulus (visual cue + noxious heat) when compared to a non-manipulation control condition. These findings will be utilized to better understand the multidimensional mechanisms supporting nociception and the cognitive modulation of pain.

Sex: All

Ages: 18 to 23 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Native/fluent English speaker
• Ability to understand/willingness to sign consent form

Exclusion criteria

• Chronic pain
• Cardiac medications
• Diagnosis of mental illness or personality disorder
• Diagnosis of heart or lung conditions/hyper tension
• Taking psychiatric medications

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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0 participants in 2 patient groups

Mindfulness

Experimental group

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness meditation

Positive reappraisal

Active Comparator group

Treatment:

Behavioral: Positive reappraisal