Lauren Yvette Atlas

The paper investigates the role of the endocannabinoid system in placebo analgesia, finding that FAAH substrates and low beta-endorphin levels are associated with pain reduction.

The paper identifies convergent and selective functional zones in the insula using fMRI data, revealing a hierarchical convergence architecture across pain, appetitive, aversive, and cognitive control domains.

This study investigates how associative learning and expectations influence pain and hedonic taste perception, finding domain-general neural circuits involved in cue effects across different modalities.

This study investigates the relationship between the endocannabinoid system and pain sensitivity in humans using quantitative sensory testing, finding no significant associations overall but a specific link between FAAH substrates and pressure pain thresholds.

The paper shows that subjective salience ratings reliably correlate with physiological arousal, supporting their use for salience-matching in pain studies.

This study compares how instructions and experiential learning affect pain perception and brain responses, finding distinct neural mechanisms for value-based learning.

The paper evaluates the effect size and test-retest reliability of the Neurologic Pain Signature (NPS) across multiple studies, finding large within-person effect sizes and reliable performance with sufficient trial numbers.

This study examines how ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) lesions affect pain modulation by expectations, finding enhanced expectancy-related pain unpleasantness in lesioned individuals.

This study investigates the spatial scale of acute pain representation using fMRI data from 289 participants, finding that distributed, multi-system models better capture pain intensity than single regions or networks.

The paper identifies brain networks mediating stimulus-pain relationships using high-dimensional mediation analysis in fMRI data from 284 humans.