NIH Director's Seminar Series: Neural and Psychological Influences on Pain and Its Assessment

Description

Pain is central to countless clinical conditions and lies at the intersection of multiple urgent health crises: 7.4 percent of U.S. adults suffer from high impact chronic pain, pain is central to the country’s “opioid epidemic”, and there are massive health disparities in pain. Placebo effects are also largest in pain, pointing to the importance of the psychosocial context surrounding pain and its treatment. However, as pain is inherently subjective, we must determine whether psychological factors shape pain through meaningful biological mechanisms, or whether they simply alter decision making and pain reports without altering underlying biology. Dr. Lauren Atlas will review a body of work focused on the impact of expectations, instructions, and learning on pain and pain-related neurobiological responses. This work indicates that parallel brain pathways, including both pain-specific and domain-general brain circuits, mediate the effects of psychological factors on pain. She will also present new data that sheds light on how social factors shape pain assessment with implications for mitigating health disparities in pain.

About the Speaker

Lauren Y. Atlas, Ph.D. is chief of the Affective Neuroscience and Pain Lab in the NCCIH Intramural Research Program. She received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Chicago in 2003, and her Ph.D. in psychology in 2011 from Columbia University, where she studied under the mentorship of Dr. Tor D. Wager. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Elizabeth Phelps at New York University’s Department of Psychology in 2014. Dr. Atlas joined the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health in 2014 as a tenure-track clinical investigator and chief of the Affective Neuroscience and Pain Lab. She holds joint appointments with the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Her laboratory uses a multimodal approach to investigate how expectations and learning influence pain and emotion, and how these factors influence clinical outcomes.

Reasonable Accommodation

For questions or special accommodations, call 301-496-1921.

This lecture is part of the NIH Director’s Seminar Series.