Emma Biggs

Stanford University | SU · Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine

A wide range of neurological diseases with impaired motor functioning of the upper extremities are accompanied by impairments of somatosensory functioning, which are often undescribed but can provide crucial information for diagnostics, treatment selection, and follow-up. Therefore, a reliable description of the functional representation of the dig...

Introduction: Current treatments for chronic musculoskeletal (MSK) pain are suboptimal. Discovery of robust prognostic markers separating patients who recover from patients with persistent pain and disability is critical for developing patient-specific treatment strategies and conceiving novel approaches that benefit all patients. Given that chron...

Compared to the field of anxiety research, the use of fear conditioning paradigms for studying chronic pain is relatively novel. Developments in identifying the neural correlates of pain-related fear are important for understanding the mechanisms underlying chronic pain and warrant synthesis to establish the state-of-the-art. Using effect-size sign...

Background and aims: Contemporary fear-avoidance models of chronic pain posit that fear of pain, and overgeneralization of fear to non-threatening stimuli is a potential pathway to chronic pain. While increasing experimental evidence supports this hypothesis, a comprehensive investigation requires testing in multiple modalities due to the diversity...

Background Acute stress can have an effect on pain sensitivity, yet the direction of the effect – whether it is hypoalgesic or hyperalgesic ‐ is mixed across studies. Moreover, which part of the stress response influences pain sensitivity is still unclear. In the current experimental study, we aim to examine the effect of acute stress on heat pain...

Fear of touch, due to allodynia and spontaneous pain, is not well understood. Experimental methods to advance this topic are lacking, and therefore we propose a novel tactile conditioning paradigm. Seventy-six pain-free participants underwent acquisition in a predictable as well as an unpredictable pain context. In the predictable context, vibrotac...

The relationship between fear and pain is highly complex and there are many mechanisms that facilitate bidirectional influence. There are emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and psychophysiological factors that allow fear to modulate the experience of pain. In addition, the expectancy of pain as well as beliefs about pain can in turn influence fear....

The relationship between fear and pain is highly complex and there are many mechanisms that facilitate bidirectional influence. There are emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and psychophysiological factors that allow fear to modulate the experience of pain. In addition, the expectancy of pain as well as beliefs about pain can in turn influence fear....