At this meeting, Dr Requena-Komuro will describe an upcoming project with Prof. Katja Wiech and Prof. Helen Blank entitled: ‘The influence of healthcare practitioner warmth and competence on the perception and neural processing of pain’. Description: Perceived warmth and competence of healthcare practitioners are key factors shaping patients’ expectations and clinical outcomes, including pain. To elucidate the underlying neural and computational mechanisms, we will conduct an fMRI study in healthy volunteers, with perceived practitioner warmth and competence experimentally manipulated through communication and pain delivered via electrical shocks. We will deploy multivariate pattern analyses and computational modelling to assess how these communication priors modulate the perception of pain.

About the meetings: Fortnightly meetings run by the Clinical Neurosciences Pain Group (NDCN). Meetings are typically seminars or open discussion and take place in a hybrid format over Teams and at the FMRIB Annexe (Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, John Radcliffe Hospital). Open to all researchers/students/clinical staff in Oxford interested in pain research.

For more details about future events and to receive the online meeting invitation, please join the mailing list: oxin-paingroup-subscribe@maillist.ox.ac.uk or email Danielle Hewitt danielle.hewitt@ndcn.ox.ac.uk for further details.