Nichole M Emerson

• Doctor of Philosophy, Neuroscience
• NA

Introduction: There is emerging evidence suggesting a relationship between obesity and chronic pain. Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine whether pain-free obese individuals display altered pain responses to acute noxious stimuli, thus raising the possibility of greater pain sensitivity and potential susceptibility for chronic pain...

Psychological factors, such as anxiety, depression, and pain catastrophizing, may affect how healthy individuals experience experimental pain. However, current literature puts forth contradictory results, possibly due to differing study methodologies, such as the type of psychophysical measure or survey. To better understand such results, this pape...

A pathological increase in vigilance, or hypervigilance, may be related to pain intensity in some clinical pain syndromes and may result from attention bias to salient stimuli mediated by anxiety. During a continuous performance task where subjects discriminated painful target stimuli from painful nontargets, we measured detected targets (hits), no...

There is emerging evidence suggesting a relationship between obesity and chronic pain. We investigated whether pain-free obese individuals display altered pain responses to acute noxious stimuli, thus raising the possibility of greater pain sensitivity and potential susceptibility for chronic pain development. Psychophysical and anthropometric data...

Although hypervigilance may play a role in some clinical pain syndromes, experimental vigilance toward painful stimuli has been studied infrequently. We evaluated vigilance toward pain by using a continuous performance task (CPT) in which subjects responded to moderately intense painful target stimuli occurring in a train of mildly painful nontarge...

Inter-individual differences in pain are shaped by a myriad of interactions between physiological, cognitive-affective and psychosocial factors. Interestingly, recent findings demonstrate that slow breathing-based manipulations reduce pain. Yet, it is unknown if non-manipulated, resting breathing rate predicts variability in behavioral and neural p...

Although hypervigilance plays an important role in some chronic pain syndromes, experimental vigilance toward pain is infrequently studied. We studied vigilance to pain by assessing performance during a Continuous Performance Task (CPT) where subjects detect moderately painful targets occurring in a train of mildly painful nontargets. The CPT was d...

Pain and depressive mood commonly exhibit a comorbid relationship. Yet, the brain mechanisms that moderate the relationship between dysphoric mood and pain remain unknown. An exploratory analysis of fMRI, behavioral and psychophysical data was collected from a previous study in seventy-six healthy, non-depressed, and pain-free individuals. Particip...

Inter-individual differences in pain sensitivity vary as a function of interactions between sensory, cognitive-affective and dispositional factors. Trait mindfulness, characterized as the innate capacity to non-reactively sustain attention to the present moment, is a psychological construct that is associated with lower clinical pain outcomes. Yet,...

During Sustained Attention to stimuli across many modalities neural activity often decreases over time on task, while Errors in task performance increase (Vigilance Decrement). Sustained Attention to pain has rarely been investigated experimentally despite its clinical significance. We have employed a Sustained Attention protocol (Continuous Perfor...

Unlabelled: Mindfulness meditation reduces pain in experimental and clinical settings. However, it remains unknown whether mindfulness meditation engages pain-relieving mechanisms other than those associated with the placebo effect (e.g., conditioning, psychosocial context, beliefs). To determine whether the analgesic mechanisms of mindfulness med...

Pruritus of End-Stage-Renal-Disease is a multifactorial symptom of complex etiology not yet fully understood. In this study we have investigated the cerebral perfusion patterns at rest in ESRD patients on hemodialysis, in comparison with healthy volunteers. We have also studied the brain responses evoked by experimental itch induction in ESRD, afte...

Pain is a highly personal experience that varies substantially among individuals. In search of an anatomical correlate of pain sensitivity we used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to investigate the relationship between grey matter density across the whole brain and inter-individual differences in pain sensitivity in 116 healthy volunteers (62 females...

Visual conditioning is a mechanism of learning where an animal forms an association between a visual stimulus and a reward or punishment. Conditioning in insects is a convenient way to establish behavioral patterns that can be compared with neural activity. Studies on visual conditioning in insects are wide ranging, however, there is little or no r...