Citation

Zhang Y. Prog. Nat. Sci. 2006; 16(4): 338-345.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Science Press)

DOI

10.1080/10020070612330002

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The pain experience includes a sensory-discriminative and an emotional-affective components. The affective dimension refers to the unpleasantness or aversion of sensation. The great progress at the genetic, molecular, cellular, and systemic levels on the study of the sensory dimension of pain has been made over past four decades. However, 'to consider only the sensory features of pain, and ignore its motivational and affective properties, is to look at only part of the problem and not even the most important part of that'. A line of clinic observations indicate that the patients with chronic pain suffer from much more affective disturbance than pain itself. Obviously, physiological arousal and hypervigilance to pain cause negative affect, such as anxiety, anger, worry, aversion, even tendency of suicide, these negative affective states in turn enhance pain sensation. Today, more and more attention has been paid to the study on mechanisms underlying affective dimension of pain. In order to deepen and expand our understanding of the nature of pain, this review summarizes the main progress and recent findings from our laboratory regarding affective component of pain in neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and cell biochemistry.