Figure 7.

Anticipatory mediators of cue effects on PPNM responses (analysis 2). a, Framework for analysis 2. We conducted a secondary mediation analysis to examine the relationship between cue-evoked anticipatory activity and pain processing network mediators depicted in Fig. 5 (left anterior insula, left rdACC, and right thalamus). We tested whether anticipatory responses mediate cue effects on PPNM pain-evoked responses on medium temperature trials. Activity was averaged across PPNMs to localize mediator voxels, and we then tested the relationship between mediators and each individual PPNM region. b, Analysis 2 results. Cue-evoked anticipatory responses in medial OFC (top) and right ventral striatum (bottom) mediated cue effects on all three PPNMs. All path coefficients were positive. Mean path coefficients and standard error for the individual pathways are presented in Table 1.