DETAILS OF PROJECT

Pain is not just a physical sensation—it’s a complex, multisensory experience that helps guide our behaviour. While acute pain is typically short-lived and adaptive, chronic pain can persist beyond injury or healing. Nociplastic pain, such as in fibromyalgia (FM) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), arises from altered processing of pain signals in the brain, without clear tissue damage. This suggests disrupted body-brain communication, which may also affect how people make decisions—especially those involving delay, effort, and uncertainty.

Our research explores how FM and IBS differ in pain experience and decision-making, and how factors like emotion and bodily awareness contribute. We aim to understand how these disruptions impact the ability to engage in long-term treatment strategies and healthy lifestyle changes. By combining behavioural tasks with brain imaging, we investigate the cognitive and neural mechanisms of altered decision-making in chronic pain, with a special focus on uncertainty.

The project is funded by the National Science Centre and is carried out by the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw - the project manager is Aleksandra Herman, PhD. We invite you to read the popular science summary of the project [in Polish].

We invite you to participate in our new study about chronic pain and decision-making processes!
We are looking for adults with fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome or no problems with chronic pain. The study is fully online.
For more information and an eligibility questionnaire, follow the link.