Pleasant Pain Relief and Inhibitory Conditioned Pain Modulation: A Psychophysical Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Inhibitory conditioned pain modulation (ICPM) is one of the principal endogenous pain inhibition mechanisms and is triggered by strong nociceptive stimuli. Recently, it has been shown that feelings of pleasantness are experienced after the interruption of noxious stimuli. Given that pleasant stimuli have analgesic effects, it is therefore possible that the ICPM effect is explained by the confounding effect of pleasant pain relief. The current study sought to verify this assumption. Methods: Twenty-seven healthy volunteers were recruited. Thermal pain thresholds were measured using a Peltier thermode. ICPM was then measured by administering a tonic thermal stimulus before and after a cold-pressor test (CPT). Following the readministration of the CPT, pleasant pain relief was measured for 4 minutes. According to the opponent process theory, pleasant relief should be elicited following the interruption of a noxious stimulus. Results: pleasant pain relief of almost 40% and 70%, respectively. Pleasant pain relief did not correlate with ICPM amplitude but was positively correlated with pain level during the CPT. Finally, a negative correlation was observed between pleasant pain relief and anxiety. Discussion: Results show that the cessation of a strong nociceptive stimulus elicits potent pleasant pain relief. The lack of correlation between ICPM and pleasant pain relief suggests that the ICPM effect, as measured by sequential paradigms, is unlikely to be fully explained by a pleasant pain relief phenomenon.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".