From Pavlov to visceroception

As a cardinal symptom of most functional gastrointestinal disorders, visceral pain and discomfort are very common and disabling. Unfortunately, such symptoms remain poorly understood and are hard to treat. There is a general consensus that fear towards gastrointestinal sensations may play an important role, but the mechanisms underlying such fear as well as its impact on visceral symptom perception are unclear. The project aims to elucidate these mechanisms, building on our previous work demonstrating that fear of gastrointestinal sensations can be experimentally established through Pavlovian learning processes and that such fear learning changes the way persons perceive gastrointestinal stimuli. In healthy volunteers, we will investigate the effects of fear learning to an initially non-painful gastrointestinal stimulus on different perceptual outcomes relevant to chronic visceral pain, including discrimination (the ability to discriminate slightly different stimuli) and habituation (decreased intensity perception upon repeated administration of an identical stimulus). These effects will be studied both at the self-report and the neural level (using electroencephalography).