The anticipation of clinical benefit, a crucial component of placebo analgesia, has been
suggested to be a special case of reward anticipation. Since reward processing is closely�…

Pain disorders and psychiatric illness are strongly comorbid, particularly in the context of
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). While these disorders account for a significant amount of�…

Background Recent neuroscientific evidence suggests that empathy for pain activates
similar neural representations as the first-hand experience of pain. However, empathy is not�…

The communication of pain requires the perception of pain-related signals and the extraction
of their meaning and magnitude to infer the state of the expresser. Here, BOLD responses�…

Introduction One of the most difficult dilemmas in relationship science and couple therapy
concerns the interaction between sexual desire and love. As two mental states of intense�…

Relief from pain in humans is frequently measured by computing the reduction on an 11‐
point pain intensity scale. However, this definition of relief may be insufficient to capture the�…

Two experiments assessed how interpersonal transactions influence responses to cold
pressor pain in women versus men. In Experiment 1, 91 young adults (57 women, 34 men)�…

The study of inter-individual differences at behavioural and neural levels represents a new
avenue for neuroscience. The response to socio-emotional stimuli varies greatly across�…

Relief fits the definition of a reward. Unlike other reward types the pleasantness of relief
depends on the violation of a negative expectation, yet this has not been investigated using�…

In non-human primates, opioid-receptor blockade increases social grooming, and the
endogenous opioid system has therefore been hypothesized to support maintenance of long�…