Papers of the Week

While the concomitant administration of painful and rewarding stimuli tends to reduce the perception of one another, recent evidence shows that pleasant pain relief is experience after the interruption of noxious stimuli. On neurobiological grounds, these opponent processes should translate into decreased activity in brain reward regions during nociceptive stimulation and increased activity in these regions after its interruption. While growing evidence supports the latter assumption, evidence is lacking in humans in support of the former.