PONE-D-20-29181

Influence of acute pain on valence rating of words

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Weiss,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. Two expert reviewers have now provided comments about your manuscript. While both reviewers had positive words about your study, they also raised several issues that i would like that you consider in a revised version of your work. After my own reading of the manuscript, i would like that you pay particular attention to the lack of description of the motivational priming theory and the possible age of acquisition confound. Also, i encourage the authors to share the stimulus materials used in their study.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 04 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

José A Hinojosa, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Review of the manuscript PONE-D-20-29181titled ‘Influence of acute pain on valence rating of words’

The present work analyzes how painful primes can influence the valence of semantic stimuli. In two experiments, participants were asked to rate the valence of different semantic stimuli (pain-related, negative, positive, and neutral adjectives) after they were primed with aversive electrical stimuli. The results showed that valence ratings of pain-related, negative, and positive words were more negative after the electrical prime. This priming effect continued even some minutes after the prime ends.

1. General comments and overall evaluation

Although the study is in general well done, it needs to be improved before publication. First, the general structure with combining sections of experiment 1 and 2, and not presenting them in separate blocks, is sometimes confusing and makes the main plot of the paper makes hard to follow. More importantly, there are some critical methodological and theoretical aspects in which the current version of the paper requires further consideration and need to be revised.

On the other hand, I think the paper is well written although I am not native speaker of English.

2. Detailed review of the different sections of the paper

Introduction

Lines 39-40. I encourage to the authors to extend the description of the motivational priming theory, which is now described only in a sentence.

The effects described in the lines 41-43 would be better understood with some examples of prime-target pairs.

Material and methods

Subjects

I only suggest the use of the term “participants” to title this section. The participant description is well done.

Pain stimuli

Pain stimuli and its calibration are clearly described.

Study design

This section is a mix of “word stimuli” and “procedure”, which I think can be confusing for the reader, so I would recommend to make separate sections for materials (words and pain stimuli), instruments (scales and current stimulator descriptions), and for procedure (task events and instructions to participants), by each experiment.

The word set is not presented as appendix or in any separate file. I understand that the authors will present the stimuli if the paper is accepted for publication as the they have committed to make all data available.

Regarding the controls on the used materials (words), I strongly miss the AoA (age of acquisition) as a matching variable. There is since some years enough evidence to consider AoA of words as important as other variables like word frequency or length in word recognition and naming tasks, among others, and critically, a statistically significant, negative correlation between AoA and valence (i.e., positive words tend to be early-acquired in life) has been consistently reported in many norms studies (e.g., Imbir, 2016; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, 2017; Warriner et al., 2013). Note that the correlation is moderate (around -.2), but it is overall higher than the correlation between lexical frequency and valence. Therefore, AoA should empirically be more relevant than frequency in the word selection of studies about emotional valence. So, I am afraid that the authors should discard a confound effect because of the possible differences in AoA between word categories in both experiments. They can collect AoA data from previous databases (Birchenough, Davies, & Connelly, 2017) or collect new AoA ratings if needed, and then compare the mean AoA of words across word categories (pain-related, negative, etc.).

Each word was presented ten times to each participant in exp.1 and I understand that some times more in exp.2, so an order effect is expected in each experiment. The words preceded by pain primes were likely negatively conditioned and therefore they can be more negative rated in subsequent trials. This potential order effect should be discarded by including trial repetition as a factor (or covariable) in the analysis.

Measures in Experiment 2.

Here one run into a number of measures by questionnaires that are not mentioned until this section. I think that the rationale of these measures in relation with the objectives of the study should be commented in the introduction.

Data analyses

I think this section should go in results. Apart of that, I think that some descriptive statistics or plots (histograms, density plots, etc.) about the dependent variables’ distribution should be reported in each experiment in order to see if there is a normal distribution. This should also be done for the scores obtained in scales used in the exp.2 as. Alternatively (or additionally), the authors could perform normality tests in the results section.

Results

All performed analyses are by participants and, having into account that there few items (10) in each category of words, I strongly recommend to carry out an analysis by items in order to know if the effects are generalizable to the rest of words with similar characteristics.

Experiment 1

All t values (and df) in each post-hoc test, statistically significant or not, should be reported and, when necessary, Bonferroni corrections should be applied.

The ANOVA on the number of recalled words by word category shows differences between some categories, but this does not mean a direct relation with the priming effect. I mean that the differences can be attributed to the word characteristics themselves as other uncontrolled but relevant variables (like AoA or imageability) might be affecting the performance of this task. This is mentioned in the limitations section with a succinct sentence “This might hint a selective memory effect” and maybe it can be expanded.

Experiment 2

Same comments about t values and Bonferroni corrections as in the experiment 1.

ANOVA should be changed by ANCOVA (line 259)

Additionally, there are some considerations about the covariates. First, “sex” was not announced to be a covariate until here, at line 272. If the authors want to control the sex (or gender) of participants, first they have to explain why, and second I consider that it is more correct to including this variable as a dummy factor to adjust the degrees of freedom of the rest of contrasts than treat it as a covariate (although this is not formally incorrect). On the other hand, the non-significant effects of any covariate seem to be surprising because it was supposed they were moderating valence ratings. Moreover, I wonder if the covariates actually make a contribution in the model. In other words, ¿would do we get the same results without the covariates? If the ANOVA (without covariates) shows different results of those from the performed ANCOVA, it is possible to conclude that the covariates actually matter because they have an effect, but this was not strong enough to be detected in this experiment. All this should be reviewed and discussed by the authors

The t values of the post hoc comparison for Block (lines 262-263) should be revised because all of them are positive and I think that there should be positive and negative values if the order of contrasted levels of Block indicate the mean differences.

Discussion

In general, I expected a more theoretical discussion about implications of the effects.

Experiment 1

It should be interesting to discuss in a deeper way the implications of the results under the motivational priming and the neural networks theories and, if possible, with a specification of the cognitive mechanisms involved in the priming effects found.

The explanation that the incongruency generated by the pairs painful stimulation-positive words might be the cause of the higher priming effect on valence ratings of this type of words compared to the other categories is speculative (the authors only cite a study about the N400 that has a very indirect relationship with the present study) and partial. The authors should explain why neutral words do not generate an incongruency when primed by painful stimulation. I do not mean that neutral words should generate an incongruency in the same magnitude than positive words, but why authors assume that neutral words do not generate incongruency at all.

Experiment 2

The sentence regarding that only trials without painful stimulation were used in the analyses (lines 311-312) would go better in results than here

Text in parenthesis at line 314 should go in procedure.

The authors re-describe the results but not explain why negative priming affected valence ratings for some minutes after the end of priming.

Limitations

The paragraph from lines 345 to 355 fits better in the discussion than here.

Typing mistakes:

Line 130, “á” >> of

Used references

Birchenough, J. M., Davies, R., & Connelly, V. (2017). Rated age-of-acquisition norms for over 3,200 German words. Behavior research methods, 49(2), 484-501.

Imbir, K. K. (2016). Affective Norms for 4900 Polish Words Reload (ANPW_R): Assessments for Valence, Arousal, Dominance, Origin, Significance, Concreteness, Imageability and, Age of Acquisition. Frontiers in Psychology, 7. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01081

Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., Imbault, C., Pérez Sánchez, M. A., & Brysbaert, M. (2017). Norms of valence and arousal for 14,031 Spanish words. Behavior Research Methods, 49(1), 111-123. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-015-0700-2

Warriner, A. B., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191-1207. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-012-0314-x

Reviewer #2: The present manuscript of Brodhum et al. investigates the influence of painful primes on the perception of the valence of subsequent semantic stimuli by two experiments. The first one, explored the existence of the effect of this influence, and second one, focused on the length of the effect. The behavioral data indicate more negative valence ratings of the emotional words (pain-related, negative and positive) after painful prime in contrast to no prime. In addition, the effect continued some minutes after the painful prime. This is a potentially interesting study since it addresses a topic that has not been studied enough up to date. Thus, while the overall research question is within the scope of PLOS ONE readers, some aspects should be need to be improved.

-The introduction section is clear and concise. However, despite using positive words in the experiments, are not information about this kind of stimuli, and how the motivational priming theory explains its possible effects. Actually, this theory indicated two opposite responses for positive versus negative stimuli. This information its important, not only to explain the use of positive words in this study. Also, because of the subsequent results that to some extent contradict the theory.

In addition, since the authors want to explore the duration of the effect, should be include previous information about this point. Or, if there are not previous evidence, indicate it.

On the other hand, since several tests were applied to evaluate different variables that could be mediating the results, it is necessary to indicate in this section how these variables can modify the effect studied.

- In the Method section, authors did not mention any method used for the calculation of the sample size. Where there a priori power analyses to support adequate power for statistical analyses?

Additionally, since working with words it is useful to know the educational level of the subjects.

Please include examples of the different selective adjectives. Positive words were balance in arousal to negative words? Please give some explanation about this aspect.

In the experiment 2, please, include the scale used to measure the valence. There are not information about the duration of the each block and the duration of the length of the interval between the blocks.

Please include the duration of the recording session and where were conducted.

Questionnaires: authors did not indicate why is important or the relation between all the tests and the variables studied. In addition, should be include a more developed explanation of the constitution of each scale used.

-In the Discussion section:

The authors indicate that the results in experiment 1 are in line with the motivational priming theory, however, as I indicated earlier, this theory considers opposite effects for negative and positive stimuli. If the negative prime (painful stimulation) has an effect in the valence of the words, why are not influence in neutral words but if the positive?

In addition, not all results are discuses, like why positive words were evaluated so much more negatively than negative ones? The motivational priming hypothesis indicates that in a negative context, the negative is exacerbated. In line with this, negative word under painful condition should be evaluate as more negative. However, the opposite effect was observed, where negative words are evaluated less negatively.

Furthermore, suddenly, a study with PER is briefly described to try to explain the effect observed in the positive words. However, the explanation is unclear and departs from the methodology used. Should we have an N400 for this task? What process would be reflecting here?

At the end of the first study, the authors indicated that not finding differences between words related to pain and negative ones was expected. However, this contradicts what was previously stated in the introduction section, lines 58 to 60.

In the case of experiment 2, there are not a discussion, just an explanation of the results. This part should be improved.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Miguel Á. Pérez-Sánchez

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

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PONE-D-20-29181R1

Influence of acute pain on valence rating of words

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Weiss,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. I have received feedback from the two original reviewers. One of them recommended acceptance (pending some very minor changes). The other reviewer still have some concerns, mainly regarding the age of acquisition of the words, that should be addressed before publication. Please, try your best with the new version of the revised manuscript as i would like to make a final decision.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 18 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

José A Hinojosa, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The manuscript has been properly improved in many ways: a clearer rationale, the experimental procedure has been better described, a more informative data analysis and results, and the discussion goes more in-depth into the cognitive mechanisms that may be explaining the results.

However, I am afraid that I still cannot recommend the current version for publication because the two main concerns I raised in the first review have not been addressed.

First, the AoA of words is still unknown. If there were no AoA scores from previous studies for the words used in the experiments, the authors could have collected them through a rating study, which should not have been complicated given the low number of items to rate. In that case, if the mean AoA scores were similar by categories a possible confounding effect due to AoA of words would have been discarded; if the AoA scores were not similar by categories the speculation about a possible effect of AoA could have been state more exactly and based on data. In any case, I consider that including the omission of AoA scores as a limitation is an easy and not a sufficient solution.

On the other hand, a by-item analysis has not been carried out as I encouraged to perform. Without it we cannot rule out that the results are due to a few items that generate a strong effect. In other words, the effects are not generalizable to other (similar) words.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript has improved a lot by the changes made since the first submission. The authors have taken into account all comments and have responded appropriately to them. I would only like to suggest a few things:

In results section: when talking about significant differences found, it is convenient to always indicate in which direction these differences go in the text. Even though there is a figure or the means, it is useful that also indicated in the text. Like in lines 223, 264.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Miguel Á. Pérez-Sánchez

Reviewer #2: Yes: Irene Peláez Cordeiro

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Influence of acute pain on valence rating of words

PONE-D-20-29181R2

Dear Dr. Weiss,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

José A Hinojosa, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have considered all comments and have responded acceptably to them.

On the one hand, once the AoA of the words has been obtained, it does not seem to be a confounding effect due to that variable.

On the other hand, although the requested “item analysis” has not been performed in the standard way (i.e., considering items as the random factor), I think that a non-significant interaction between prime and word contributes to discard that the priming effects on valence ratings are not just due to a few items. BUT, I would only like to suggest that the result for the three-way interaction category*prime*word should be reported in order to remove any doubt about the effect of items on the critical interaction category*prime.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Miguel Á. Pérez-Sánchez