Investigate the brain mechanism of the impact of sexism on pain perception

Gender discrimination is a serious problem in today's society
.

Discrimination is related to social pain.
Individuals who are discriminated against can experience similar negative feelings (such as unpleasant and uncomfortable feelings) as they experience physical pain
.

In addition, social pain and physical pain can influence each other, for example, individuals experiencing social pain have increased pain sensitivity to noxious stimuli
.

At the same time, the negative pain caused by persistent discrimination will cause chronic physical pain, which is related to the intensity of the pain
.

Past neuroimaging studies have found that experiencing social pain can activate brain areas related to physical pain, such as the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), basal nucleus, etc.
, as well as the emotion-related right ventral prefrontal cortex (rVPFC).
)
.

But there is no direct evidence to show how the observed social pain (that is, gender discrimination) directly affects the brain's response to physical pain
.

A study was carried out by Kong Yazhuo's research team at the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and collaborators
.

Based on the task state fMRI of 33 healthy female participants (Figure 1), the researchers used whole brain analysis, ROI analysis, and PPI analysis to explore changes in brain activity when women experienced heat pain after viewing sexist pictures.
Sex discrimination affects the psychological and neurological mechanisms of pain assessment
.

Figure 1.
The fMRI paradigm, including viewing sexist pictures (picture stage) and receiving thermal pain stimulation (pain stage).
The results show that, first of all, in the picture stage, compared with the control, the activity of the temporal polar cortex increases, and the participants are in After scanning, the discrimination scores of the pictures were positively correlated (Figure 2-A, B); secondly, in the pain stage, compared with the control, the activities of dACC and basal nucleus were significantly enhanced under discrimination conditions (Figure 2-C); and There is a positive correlation between the activation of the temporal polar cortex and the activation of dACC in the pain stage at the picture stage, indicating that sexism plays an important role in the perception of physical pain (Fig.
2-F); finally, the PPI analysis with dACC as the seed point found that in the picture In the pain stage, there is a connection between the pain-specific dACC and the secondary somatosensory cortex (SII) (Figure 3-A), and there is a connection between the dACC and the frontal lobe in the pain stage (Figure 3-B)
.

Figure 2.
Whole brain analysis results Figure 3.
PPI analysis results In summary, the results of the study found that dACC is involved in the process of gender discrimination affecting pain perception, and this process is related to the activities of the temporal polar cortex
.

The research provides the first evidence that when individuals watch the experience of others being discriminated against, they also increase their own pain experience.
It also provides new insights for how to create new interventions to reduce the suffering of individuals suffering from discrimination
.

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32100861, 81871436, 82072010, 32071016, 82030121) and the Science Foundation of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (201900050, Y9CX432005)
.

Assistant researcher Zhang Ming of the Institute of Psychology is the first author of the paper, and researcher Kong Yazhuo is the corresponding author
.

The research results have been published online in NeuroImage
.

   Paper information: Ming Zhang, Yuqi Zhang, Yan Mu, Zhaoxing Wei, Yazhuo Kong*.
(2021).
Gender discrimination facilitates fMRI responses and connectivity to thermal pain, NeuroImage, 2021, 118644, ISSN 1053-8119, https://doi .
org/10.
1016/j.
neuroimage.
2021.
118644.
Source: Kong Yazhuo Research Group, Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences