Multisensory Integration and Pain Perception

Pain is a predominant disruption of well-being among humans. Feeling pain is a multimodal
sensory experience where information is collected and processed from various senses such as
sight and touch. Because pain is complex, variable, and experienced differently by each
individual, finding more accessible and practical treatments for pain are necessary.
Mindfulness meditation (MM) aims to reduce pain by directing focus to perceive thoughts
through non-judgmental awareness. Positive reappraisal (PR) is a possible cognitive pain
treatment that focuses on changing the meaning of stressful or negative events into positive,
benign, valuable, or beneficial. When a stressful event, such as experiencing pain, is
positively reappraised, the individual recognizes and engages with the feeling of stress
produced by the event and intentionally looks for benefits that change the feeling from
negative to positive. The focus of this study is to examine the effect of different cognitive
techniques on multimodal innocuous and noxious stimuli. Visual and tactile noxious stimuli
will be administered to determine how visual cue integrate to form and modulate the
subjective experience of pain. The study team postulates that mindfulness meditation and
positive reappraisal will significantly reduce pain in response to multimodal stimulus
(visual cue + noxious heat) when compared to a non-manipulation control condition. These
findings will be utilized to better understand the multidimensional mechanisms supporting
nociception and the cognitive modulation of pain.