| Cortical and Subcortical Areas | Involvement in Pain | Involvement in Decision-Making |
|---|---|---|
| Amygdala | Affective/motivational component of pain; emotional significance; attention; pain modulation [44] | Impulsive emotional responses; emotional salience; attention; emotions for learned associations [30] |
| Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) | Affective/motivational component of pain; emotional significance; pain modulation; error [18] | Cognition; motor control; motivation salience; error detection; conflict; anticipation; reward assessment [41] |
| Cerebellum | Affective/motivational and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; emotion; cognition; motor control [45] | Attention; working memory; reasoning; problem solving under uncertainty [46] |
| Hypothalamus | Sensory/discrimative, affective/motivational component of pain; relay station/ascending pain pathway; coding pain; attention [47] | Motivation; emotional salience (48) |
| Insula | Affective/motivational and sensory/discrimative component of pain; pain modulation [49] | Awareness; memory, executive functioning; association cues; motivation [40] |
| Nucleus Accumbens | Affective/motivational component of pain; emotional valence; pain modulation [50] | Learning associations; emotional salience/valence of reward or punishment; motivation [51] |
| Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC) | Affective/motivational and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; pain valuation; cognitive [52] | Reward/pain processing; working memory; associations of emotion and stimuli [53] |
| Parabrachial Nucleus (PBN) | Affective/motivational and sensory/discrimative component of pain; arousal; target in ascending nociceptive pathway [54] | Not directly but plays a role in pleasure and pain; arousal |
| Periaqueductal Gray (PAG) | Affective/motivational and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; arousal; attention; control center of pain modulation; errors in prediction [55, 56] | Impulsive unconscious behaviors [57] |
| Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) | Affective/motivational and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; pain modulation; attention [58] | Social/moral reasoning [35]; Attention; Learning; adaptive decision-making; integration of associative information [59] Ventromedial: working-memory; impulsivity; future consquences; emotional salience of reward or punishment [60] |
| Primary Somatosensory (S1) | Sensory/discrimative and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; attention; previous experience; pain intensity [13, 61] | ? |
| Secondary Somatosensory (S2) | Sensory/discrimative and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; attention; pain valuation; pain intensity [62] | Past and present information (39) |
| Thalamus | Sensory/discrimative, affective/motivational, and cognitive/evaluative component of pain; relay station; coding pain; attention [63] | Works in conjunction with PFC for learning; adaptive decision-making; integration of associative information [59] |