Controllability of Virtual Contexts for the Modulation of the Affective Experience
Trustees of Dartmouth College
Summary
This study investigates how spatial context and perceived controllability modulate pain, affective states such as anxiety, and motivated behavior. The study examines how control over pain and threat-related environments influences pain perception, state anxiety, associated autonomic responses, and behavior. The main questions it aims to answer are: Does having control over pain within specific contexts alter how much pain people feel-even when the stimulus intensity remains constant? How do different types of environments (safe, controllable, or uncontrollable) shape pain-related brain activity, subjective anxiety, and physiological arousal? How do people perform cognitively demanding or distracting tasks (and retain their memory) when under threat versus when in control? Lastly, how do these learned associations with spatial contexts persist or adapt when environmental contingencies are explicitly changed? Taken together, exploration of these factors may lay the groundwork for understanding how placebo-related mechanisms-including perceived control, contextual learning, emotional engagement, and distraction-interact to shape pain and anxiety in complex environments.
Description
The study investigates how perceived controllability and threat-related spatial contexts influence pain perception, affective state, autonomic responses, and behavior. Specifically, it aims to dissect the systems-level mechanisms by which humans interpret and respond to painful experiences in environments that differ in perceived threat and agency. These mechanisms-spanning from pain perception to context-driven learning and flexible adaptation-are central to understanding both everyday coping and the cognitive underpinnings of placebo effects. Participants will explore three distinct virtual…
Eligibility
- Age range
- 18–55 years
- Sex
- All
- Healthy volunteers
- Yes
* No self-reported current or history of depression, bipolar disorder, or other psychiatric diagnosis * No self-reported current seizure disorder (i.e., seizure within past 10 years), or history of stroke or other major neurological diagnosis * No self-reported current chronic pain, or acute pain within three months of the study period * No current migraine disorder (i.e., 15 headache days or more in 1 month) * No use of central nervous system-effective medication or other medication for neurological/psychiatric treatment * No self-reported substance abuse within the last six months * No contr…
Interventions
- BehavioralPain Threat Manipulation
Participants receive brief thermal pain stimuli in certain virtual environments to examine how threat influences perception and physiological responses.
- BehavioralPain Controllability Manipulation
In some contexts, participants can reduce or avoid pain using a button; in others, no action changes the outcome. This manipulation is used to study the effects of perceived control over pain.
Location
- Dartmouth CollegeHanover, New Hampshire