ArticleNature communications2025
Controllability changes pain perception by increasing the precision of expectations.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Source-bound perceptual persistence in chronic orofacial symptoms: a hypothesis framework.Journal of oral & facial pain and headache · 2026Review
- Reward-induced endogenous pain inhibition scales with action-outcome certainty in humans.Pain · 2026Article
- Brain rhythms of depression: A predictive processing perspective.Trends in neurosciences · 2026Review
- Pain in Alzheimer's Disease: Disrupted Multilevel Integration of Nociception, Affective Processing and Clinical Expression Across Clinical and Preclinical Evidence.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Temporal predictions shape somatosensory perception.Nature communications · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The ability to exert control over an intensely unpleasant experience, such as pain, can modulate its perception. It is often assumed that control exerts this modulatory effect through a specific control mechanism. We revisit this issue using a task that allowed participants to either control or predict the intensity of a painful stimulus. By approximating Bayesian perceptual integration with computational models, our data show that acute pain modulation by control can be parsimoniously explained by an increase in expectation precision. Importantly, this effect is present in contrast to a condition in which pain is equally predictable, but not controllable. The control-induced increase in expectation precision leads to activation changes in the periaqueductal gray, the supplementary motor area and the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, regions that mediate the interplay between threat uncertainty, motor-control and descending pain modulation.
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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.