Interindividual differences in pain can be explained by fMRI, sociodemographic, and psychological factors

Abstract

In a recent article, Hoeppli et al. 1 reported that sociodemographic and psychological factors were not associated with interindividual differences in reported pain intensity. In addition, the interindividual differences in pain could not be detected by thermal pain-evoked brain activities measured by functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). Their comprehensive analyses provided convincing evidence for the null findings, but here, we provide another look at their conclusions by analyzing a new large-scale fMRI dataset involving thermal pain (N = 124) and re-analyzing their behavioral and fMRI data (N = 101). Our main findings are as follows: First, a multiple regression model incorporating all available sociodemographic and psychological measures could significantly predict the interindividual differences in reported pain intensity. The key to achieving a significant prediction was to include multiple individual difference measures in a single model. Second, with a new fMRI dataset with a group of 124 participants, we could identify brain regions and a multivariate pattern-based predictive model significantly correlated with the interindividual differences in reported pain intensity. Our results, along with Hoeppli et al.’s findings, highlight the challenge of predicting interindividual differences in pain but also suggest that it is not an impossible task.