Conditioned Modulation of Pain Depends on Sex, Personal Attributes and the Perceived Characteristics of the Painful Stimulus

Characteristics of noxious stimuli and personal attributes shape our experience of pain, but only few studies have rigorously tried to characterize which specific traits impact pain processing. We will discuss the recent article by Firouzian et al. that tries to identify the impact of both positively and negatively regarded personal traits on conditioned pain modulation (CPM): resilience and catastrophization. The authors showed sex-dependent correlation of CPM varying with personal traits as well as characteristics of the conditioning stimulus: unpleasantness and salience.