Mia Thomaidou

Chapter 6 – EEG imaging 197 Tools, Pittsburgh, PA, USA) indicated whether a trial was on a gel site or on a control site. The messages read “Trans-Dermal Aspartate, painincreasing capsaicin, gel form” or “Control trial, no gel”. During nocebo acquisition, the nocebo gel was paired to surreptitiously increased pain stimulations during nocebo trials, while moderate pain was delivered during control trials. During nocebo evocation, all pain stimuli during both nocebo and control trials were applied at moderate intensity, to study whether evoked conditioned responses were elicited. Increased pain reports for a nocebo trial as compared to its preceding control trial in this phase indicated nocebo hyperalgesia. EEG materials EEG recordings were conducted using the ActiveTwo BioSemi (Amsterdam, the Netherlands) electrode system from 32 scalp electrodes. As reference electrodes, BioSemi replaces the ground electrodes that are used in conventional systems with two additional electrodes. The Common Mode Sense active electrode and Driven Right Leg passive electrode form a feedback loop, which drives the average potential of the participant as close as possible to the reference voltage of the analog-to-digital converter, thus rendering them references. Data was acquired at a sampling rate of 1024 Hz, band-passed filtered online during acquisition from 0.1 to 100 Hz (with a 100 Hz low-pass and 0.01 Hz high-pass hardware filter). Electrodes were placed on the scalp according to the international 10–20 system and where possible, electrode impedances were kept below 20 kOhm. Questionnaires

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