Trial reportPloS one2011
Relief as a reward: hedonic and neural responses to safety from pain.
Trial report in PloS one, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. It is linked to trial NCT04685018 (The Neurocircuitry of Relief During Avoidance Learning in Patients With Obsessive-compulsive Disorder), which is not on this map. Cited by 98 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
The Neurocircuitry of Relief During Avoidance Learning in Patients With Obsessive-compulsive Disorder
Who cites it
98 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 206 citations in OpenAlex.
- Separate neural representations of prediction error valence and surprise: Evidence from an fMRI meta-analysis.Human brain mapping · 2018Pooled it
- The effect of acute physical pain on subsequent negative emotional affect: A meta-analysis.Personality disorders · 2018Pooled it
- Neural signatures of human fear conditioning: an updated and extended meta-analysis of fMRI studies.Molecular psychiatry · 2016Pooled it
- Common and distinct neural correlates of personal and vicarious reward: A quantitative meta-analysis.NeuroImage · 2015Pooled it
- Dopamine has no direct causal role in the formation of treatment expectations and placebo analgesia in humans.PLoS biology · 2024Trial
- The effect of dopamine on conditioned placebo analgesia in healthy individuals: a double-blind randomized trial.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Placebo improves pleasure and pain through opposite modulation of sensory processing.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2013Trial
- Trial
- Dynamic coupling of emotion and pain: from perception to affective response.The Korean journal of pain · 2026Review
- Brain network representations of placebo analgesia.Psychological medicine · 2026Article
- Counterfactual relief.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Involvement of the central amygdaloid nucleus in the regulation of sex differences in the stress relief response in mice.Biology of sex differences · 2026Article
- Review
- Why do individuals with generalized anxiety disorder and depression engage in worry and rumination? A momentary assessment study of positive contrast enhancement.Journal of anxiety disorders · 2025Article
- Article
- Diminished reward circuit response underlies pain avoidance learning deficits in problem drinkers.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2025Article
- State- and Circuit-Dependent Opponent Processing of Fear.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- Safety signals reinforce instrumental avoidance in humans.Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Brain representations of affective valence and intensity in sustained pleasure and pain.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Motivated with joy or anxiety: Does approach-avoidance goal framing elicit differential reward-network activation in the brain?Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
38 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
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 neuroimaging approaches. We hypothesized that the degree of negative expectation depends on state (dread) and trait (pessimism) sensitivity. Of the brain regions that are involved in mediating pleasure, the nucleus accumbens also signals unexpected reward and positive prediction error. We hypothesized that accumbens activity reflects the level of negative expectation and subsequent pleasant relief. Using fMRI and two purpose-made tasks, we compared hedonic and BOLD responses to relief with responses during an appetitive reward task in 18 healthy volunteers. We expected some similarities in task responses, reflecting common neural substrates implicated across reward types. However, we also hypothesized that relief responses would differ from appetitive rewards in the nucleus accumbens, since only relief pleasantness depends on negative expectations. The results confirmed these hypotheses. Relief and appetitive reward task activity converged in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which also correlated with appetitive reward pleasantness ratings. In contrast, dread and pessimism scores correlated with relief but not with appetitive reward hedonics. Moreover, only relief pleasantness covaried with accumbens activation. Importantly, the accumbens signal appeared to specifically reflect individual differences in anticipation of the adverse event (dread, pessimism) but was uncorrelated to appetitive reward hedonics. In conclusion, relief differs from appetitive rewards due to its reliance on negative expectations, the violation of which is reflected in relief-related accumbens activation.
Indexed as
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.