Several studies have focussed on defining the network of brain structures involved in pain. Pain perception (sensory discriminative, affective/emotional, cognitive/evaluative) has been shown to depend on different areas of the brain. Modern neuroimaging methods have been used to determine whether different pain symptoms involve similar brain structures. These studies indicated that acute physiological pain and neuropathic pain have distinct although overlapping brain activation patterns, but that there is no unique pain matrix/allodynia network.
Several contemporary neuroscientists and cognitive scientists make a similar distinction between emotions as bodily events and feelings as mental events and regard symbolization as an important element in the cognitive processing of emotions. Awareness of feelings, together with the thoughts, fantasies, and memories that they elicit, facilitates modulation of the emotional arousal induced by stressful events. Feelings are attributed to the symbolic representation in working memory of the activity of unconsciously operating subsymbolic systems that generate the brain states and bodily responses which comprise emotions. These representations become integrated with representations of past experiences and representations of the self. Attributing the feeling of specific basic emotions to 'viscerosomatic self-representations' in the lower levels of the brain, attributing reşective awareness and the capacity for experiencing higher-order feelings to linguistic symbolizations and an ability to think in perceptual images is important for the parsing and regulation of emotional states.
According to Lumley alexithymia is associated with tonic physiological hyperarousal, certain types of unhealthy behavior, and a biased perception and reporting of somatic sensations and symptoms. Alexithymia probably inşuences illness behavior, but there is little support for the hypothesis that alexithymia leads to chronic organic disease. Alexithymia links with physical illness due to four possible pathways: a) alexithymia leads to organic disease through physiological or behavioral mechanisms, b) alexithymia leads to illness behavior through cognitive or social mechanisms, c) physical illness leads to alexithymia, and d) both alexithymia and physical illness result from sociocultural or biological factors. Research on the effects of emotional trauma resulted in the hypothesis that traumatic experiences in childhood or adult life may have adverse consequences for physical health. It has been shown that there is evidence of a correlational association between childhood trauma and somatization in adulthood, and several retrospective studies with very large samples have demonstrated an association between childhood trauma and the development of somatic disease in adult life. An unanswered question is: what are the psychological/biological mechanisms that might render trauma in earlier years a risk factor for the development of disease later in life? The associations between alexithymia, somatization, dissociation and trauma, have led to the suggestion that dissociation acts as a defense against emotionally distressing memories that are associated with the traumatic avents. Attachment insecurity and associated deficits in affect development and affect regulation are linked not only to the experience of being raised by parents with impaired capacities for mentalization, but sometimes also to more severe developmental traumas. Dissociation within emotion schemas is initially an adaptive response to external danger arousal and is especially severe when the child experiences the parent as a threat, for then there is no safe place to be.