Elia Valentini

University of Essex · Department of Psychology and Centre for Brain Science

Recent research has pointed to alpha brain oscillations as a potential clinical biomarker for sensitivity to pain. In particular, researchers claimed that the slowing of individual alpha frequency (IAF) could be an objective marker of pain during prolonged nociceptive stimulation. However, prolonged pain has been also associated with increased IAF....

Background: Therapeutic approaches to fibromyalgia (FM) are shifting towards a mixed multi-treatment approach to tackle the variety of symptoms experienced in FM. Importantly, little is known about FM patients’ attitude towards the available treatments. Methods: A cross-sectional web survey obtained responses from 464 sufferers who satisfied diagn...

Terror management theory (TMT) suggests that reminders of death activate an exclusive anxiety mechanism different from the one activated by other types of symbolic threats. This notion is supported by evidence showing how experimental participants verbally reflecting on their own death are then influenced in their opinions and behaviours. A previou...

Several studies have used neuroimaging techniques in an attempt to characterize brain correlates of the attentional modulation of pain. Although these studies have advanced the knowledge in the field, important confounding factors such as imprecise theoretical definitions of attention, incomplete operationalization of the construct under exam, and...

Studies report that viewing the body or keeping one's arms crossed while receiving painful stimuli may have an analgesic effect. Interestingly, changes in ratings of pain are accompanied by a reduction of brain metabolism or of laser evoked potentials (LEPs) amplitude. What remains unknown is the link between visual and crossed arms related analges...

Our current economic and political structures have an increasingly devastating impact on the Earth's climate and ecosystems: we are facing a biospheric emergency, with catastrophic consequences for both humans and the natural world on which we depend. Life scientists-including biologists, medical scientists, psychologists and public health experts-...

We are facing an emergency that encompasses the entire biosphere, with devastating consequences for both humans and the natural world on which we depend. As the climate and ecological crises accelerate, scientists are coming to terms with failings inherent in the modes of action we have used to engage society about their ongoing and future effects....

The complexity of brain activity involved in the generation of the experience of pain makes it hard to identify neural markers able to predict pain states. The within and between subjects variability of pain hinders the predictive potential of machine learning models trained across participants. This challenge can be tackled by implementing deep le...

Recent research proposed that the slowing of individual alpha frequency (IAF) could be an objective marker of pain. However, it is unclear whether this research can fully address the requirements of specificity and sensitivity of IAF to the pain experience. Here, we sought to develop a robust methodology for assessing the specificity of the relatio...

Chronic pain (CP) is estimated to affect at least one-third of the population in the United Kingdom. Fibromyalgia (FM) is one of the most disabling CP conditions. Epidemiological research suggests its global prevalence to be between 2-8%. The unknown pathogenesis, lack of biological markers to monitor its development, and lack of successful treatme...

Background The processing of brief pain and touch stimuli has been associated with an increase of neuronal oscillations in the gamma range (40-90 Hz). However, some studies report divergent gamma effects across single participants. Methods In two repeated sessions we recorded gamma responses to pain and touch stimuli using EEG. Individual gamma re...

The peripersonal space (PPS) is a special portion of space immediately surrounding the body, where the integration between tactile stimuli delivered on the body and auditory or visual events emanating from the environment occurs. Interestingly, PPS can widen if a tool is employed to interact with objects in the far space. However, electrophysiologi...

Background The past two decades have seen a particular focus towards high-frequency neural activity in the gamma band (>30 Hz). However, gamma band activity shares frequency range with unwanted artefacts from muscular activity. New Method We developed a novel approach to remove muscle artefacts from neurophysiological data. We re-analysed existing...

Background The past two decades have seen a particular focus towards high-frequency neural activity in the gamma band (>30Hz). However, gamma band activity shares frequency range with unwanted artefacts from muscular activity. New Method We developed a novel approach to remove muscle artefacts from neurophysiological data. We re-analysed existing...

Background Therapeutic approaches to fibromyalgia (FM) are shifting towards a combined multi‐treatment approach to tackle the variety of symptoms experienced in FM. Importantly, little is known about FM patients’ attitude towards the available treatments. Methods A cross‐sectional web survey obtained responses from 464 individuals who satisfied di...

‘Placebo analgesia’ refers to the reduction of pain following the administration of an inactive treatment. While most clinical trials compare a drug treatment against a placebo to determine the efficacy of the analgesic, most experimental studies of placebo analgesia do not include a real analgesic condition. A direct comparison of placebo against...

Abstract Background: Many fibromyalgia (FM) patients report to be unsatisfied with the available treatments. Recently, therapeutic approaches are shifting towards more holistic, multicomponent approach to treat the condition. The aim of our study was to investigate what attitudes FM patients have towards the available treatments and how their thoug...

Previous research showed that images possessing arousing content lead to changes in the emotional/affective states of the onlooker. We combined this evidence with the notion that reminders of death activate an exclusive anxiety mechanism different from the one activated by other types of symbolic threats. This notion is supported by evidence showin...

Current theories of object perception emphasize the automatic nature of perceptual inference. Repetition suppression (RS), the successive decrease of brain responses to repeated stimuli, is thought to reflect the optimization of perceptual inference through neural plasticity. While functional imaging studies revealed brain regions that show suppres...

Research suggests that working memory (WM) is impaired in chronic pain. Yet, information on how potentially noxious stimuli are maintained in memory is limited in patients as well as in healthy people. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) in healthy volunteers during a modified delayed match-to-sample task where maintenance in memory of relevan...

Suppression of spinal responses to noxious stimulation has been detected using spinal fMRI during placebo analgesia, which is therefore increasingly considered a phenomenon caused by descending inhibition of spinal activity. However, spinal fMRI is technically challenging and prone to false-positive results. Here we recorded laser-evoked potentials...

Research on brain mechanisms of deviance detection and sensory memory trace formation, best indexed by the mismatch negativity, mainly relied on the investigation of responses elicited by auditory stimuli. However, comparable less research reported the mismatch negativity elicited by somatosensory stimuli. More importantly, little is known on the f...

Existential social psychology studies show that awareness of one's eventual death profoundly influences human cognition and behaviour by inducing defensive reactions against end-of-life related anxiety. Much less is known about the impact of reminders of mortality on brain activity. Therefore we explored whether reminders of mortality influence sub...

We studied whether nociceptive mismatch negativity (nMMN) could be obtained as result of nociceptive fibers stimulation. The purported nMMN revealed a topography similar to the somatosensory MMN (sMMN), which was observed at the bilateral temporal regions of the scalp. Importantly, only early negativities (100-250 ms) located at these regions revea...

The strength of the placebo effect is influenced by social contexts and individual personality. Although facial expressions provide important contextual cues no studies on their influence on the placebo response has been performed hitherto. Here we tested whether (1) the observation of facial expressions with different emotional content (Neutral, P...

Background / Purpose: Little amount of research reported the mismatch negativity phenomenon in other sensory modalities than auditory. Here, using a roving paradigm, we collected event-related potentials elicited by auditory, non-nociceptive somatosensory, and nociceptive trains of stimuli, during both active and passive attentional conditions. T...

Unlabelled: Nociceptive stimuli can induce a transient suppression of electroencephalographic oscillations in the alpha frequency band (ie, alpha event-related desynchronization, α-ERD). Here we investigated whether α-ERD could be functionally distinguished in 2 temporally and spatially segregated subcomponents as suggested by previous studies. In...

Observing models displaying facial expressions of pain elicits neural activity in onlookers' neural structures involved in first-hand experience of pain and in monitoring conflicting information. We investigated whether the purported conflict between the pain and its emotional expression in a model modulates cortical responses elicited by nocicepti...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited by transient nociceptive stimuli in humans are largely sensitive to bottom-up novelty, induced, for example by changes in stimulus attributes (e.g. modality or spatial location) within a stream of repeated stimuli. Here we aimed (1) to test the contribution of a selective change of the intensity of a repeate...

Summary The event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by nociceptive stimuli are largely influenced by vigilance, emotion, alertness, and attention. Studies that specifically investigated the effects of ognition on nociceptive ERPs support the idea that most of these ERP components can be regarded as the europhysiological indexes of the processe...

Multimodal integration, which mainly refers to multisensory facilitation and multisensory inhibition, is the process of merging multisensory information in the human brain. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the dynamic characteristics of multimodal integration are not fully understood. The objective of this study is to investigate the basic...

Feeling pain and seeing it in others activates largely overlapping neural substrates. A recent study (Corradi-Dell'Acqua C, Hofstetter C, Vuilleumier P. J Neurosci 31: 17996-18006, 2011) for the first time raises the question of whether shared neural activations specifically code pain-related contents or merely their negative-aversive implication....

Introduction: Neuroimaging studies indicate that hypnotic suggestions of increased and decreased pain intensity and unpleasantness may modulate somatosensory and cingulate cortex activity, respectively. Methods: Using a within subject design and a strict subject selection procedure, we tested in High (Highs) and Low (Lows) hypnotically suggestib...

The repetition of nociceptive stimuli of identical modality, intensity and location at short (1 s) and constant inter-stimulus interval (ISI) determines a strong habituation of the corresponding electroencephalographic (EEG) responses. To understand what determines this response habituation, we (1) examined the effect of introducing a selective cha...

The repetition of nociceptive stimuli of identical modality, intensity, and location at short and constant interstimulus intervals (ISIs) determines a strong habituation of the corresponding EEG responses, without affecting the subjective perception of pain. To understand what determines this response habituation, we (i) examined the effect of intr...

Viewing other's pain inhibits the excitability of the motor cortex and also modulates the neural activity elicited by a concomitantly delivered nociceptive somatosensory stimulus. As the neural activity elicited by a transient nociceptive stimulus largely reflects non nociceptive-specific, multimodal neural processes, here we tested, for the first...

Objectives Over the past 10 years there has been increasing concern about the possible behavioural effects of mobile phone use. This systematic review and meta-analysis focuses on studies published since 1999 on the human cognitive and performance effects of mobile phone-related electromagnetic fields (EMF). Methods PubMed, Biomed, Medline, Biologi...

Research on the cortical sources of nociceptive laser-evoked brain potentials (LEPs) began almost two decades ago (Tarkka and Treede, 1993). Whereas there is a large consensus on the sources of the late part of the LEP waveform (N2 and P2 waves), the relative contribution of the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) to the early part of the LEP wavefor...

Over the past 10 years there has been increasing concern about the possible behavioural effects of mobile phone use. This systematic review and meta-analysis focuses on studies published since 1999 on the human cognitive and performance effects of mobile phone-related electromagnetic fields (EMF). PubMed, Biomed, Medline, Biological Sciences, Psych...

The understanding of others' feelings and emotional states is commonly defined by the term empathy. Here, I discuss recent findings regarding the differential contribution of anterior insula and anterior cingulate cortices to this function. For the first time, Gu and colleagues (2010) showed no direct involvement of the anterior cingulate during ob...

The present study investigated the presence of a cumulative effect of brief and repeated exposures to a GSM mobile phone (902.40 MHz, 217 Hz modulated; peak power of 2 W; average power of 0.25 W; SAR = 0.5 W/kg) on psychomotor functions. To this end, after each of 3 15-min exposures, both an acoustic simple reaction time task (SRTT) and a sequentia...

In recent years a growing number of people have begun to use mobile phone technology. This phenomenon has raised questions and doubts about possible effects on users' brains. This literature review focuses on the human electrophysiological and neuro-metabolic effects of mobile phone (MP)-related electromagnetic fields (EMFs) published in the last 1...