Is pain really an experience with many parts? Is it possible to separate the sensation from the emotional feeling of pain? This review pulled together all the experimental studies that have tried to tease pain into these components to find out what the scientific evidence says about whether pain can be separated into components. This is a complex but accessible discussion with important implications for what we understand pain to be.

Many pain researchers use averages and group patterns to describe the information they collect from people who participate in pain experiments. But when we look at group patterns, we miss the patterns within each person’s reports of pain. Those patterns might be important, considering that people who seek treatment for pain don’t want treatment that works for a group; they want treatment that will work for themselves - for an individual. We wrote this commentary to remind other pain researchers to think about this when we report the data we gather in experiments.

Many people who live with HIV report chronic pain that limits their daily life - but why is pain so common and so problematic for these people? This review briefly summarises what we do and don’t know about HIV-related pain.

Threat influences pain - but how? Our group is developing ways to ask this question with strong science. This study tested whether threat changes the sensitivity of neural signalling about potentially dangerous events - and encountered some significant hurdles along the way.

Neural signals are constantly being adjusted inside our bodies; our systems can turn the volume of signalling up or down. Some research suggests that an impaired ability to suppress danger signals can contribute to problematic pain. In this work, we reviewed studies that had used a particular lab-based technique to induce excessive danger signalling - experimentally induced secondary hypersensitivity - and tested a non-drug intervention’s ability to control that signalling.   We wanted to understand which non-drug interventions have the potential to improve a person’s ability to suppress excessive danger signals.