What Is the Relationship between Pain and Emotion?
Great to see these guys out of Stanford put out an article asking the scientific and medical community to bridge the gap between pain and emotion, as we have severed the mind from the body with pain for far too long. The authors put together a nice brain map you see here showing the overlap between brain areas that process both emotion and sensory pain.
Here’s a quote from the article linked below.
“Taken together, one’s perspective on the nature of emotion has an important impact on how we understand pain, and vice versa. Crucially, millions of people across the globe suffer from various chronic pain conditions and from emotion-related pathologies, which often occur together. In the paper, we map the conceptual, functional, and neural connections between the constructs of pain and emotion, and call for more direct scientific efforts to study their bi-directional relationship. Moreover, these connections should lead to greater synergy and collaboration between the two scientific and clinical communities of pain and emotion, which remain siloed from each other. Both fields can benefit from the theories, methods, and findings accumulated in the other.”
