Affective and social pain modulation in children—Experimental evidence using picture viewing

Katrin Hillmer; Judith Kappesser; Christiane Hermann

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0313636

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 20, 2024
9 Aug 2024 Decision Letter - José A Hinojosa, Editor PONE-D-24-21539Affective and social pain modulation in children – experimental evidence using picture viewingPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Kappesser, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 23 2024 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: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, José A Hinojosa, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. We note that you have indicated that there are restrictions to data sharing for this study. For studies involving human research participant data or other sensitive data, we encourage authors to share de-identified or anonymized data. However, when data cannot be publicly shared for ethical reasons, we allow authors to make their data sets available upon request. For information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Before we proceed with your manuscript, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially identifying or sensitive patient information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., a Research Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board, etc.). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. Please see http://www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c181.long for guidelines on how to de-identify and prepare clinical data for publication. For a list of recommended repositories, please see https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories. You also have the option of uploading the data as Supporting Information files, but we would recommend depositing data directly to a data repository if possible. Please update your Data Availability statement in the submission form accordingly. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that [Insert text from online submission form here]. All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. 4. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. 5. We note that Figure 1 in your submission contain [map/satellite] images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission: 1. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure 1 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text: “I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.” Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an ""Other"" file with your submission. In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].” 2. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful: USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/ Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/ USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/# Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ Additional Editor Comments (if provided): [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] 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: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 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: Yes ****** 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 ****** 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: This is an interesting study that experimentally explores pain modulation (using positive, negative, and social stimuli) in children by analyzing self-reported and psychophysiological measures (i.e., SCL, HR, and corrugator EMG). However, my main concern is with the analysis, so I have some questions and suggestions that might help improve the manuscript: 1. Abstract (page 2, line 28). Please consider changing to “…extends previous findings in adults”. 2. Introduction (page 3). The introduction is clear and well structured, with references to a theoretical model and previous studies (mainly on adult samples), but is somewhat brief (e.g., no reference is made to the relevance of using psychophysiological measures to measure pain modulation). Previous studies have reported that subjective valence and arousal correspond to facial EMG and SCL, respectively (see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107974). 3. Introduction (page 4, lines 59-60). Please consider changing to “…modulating effect of pictures varying in affective quality (positive and negative scenes, happy and neutral faces) and social content (mother, strangers faces)…”. 4. Introduction (page 4, line 65). Please consider changing to “We hypothesized...”. 5. Materials and methods (page 4, lines 73-74). The data collection was carried out about 12 years ago. Why? 6. Materials and methods (page 5, lines 85-86). Much of the research indicates that despite altered patterns of interaction in adolescents, parent-child relationships remain important social and emotional resources well beyond the childhood years (see https://doi.org/10.1002/9780471726746.ch11). However, because the sample includes a wide age range (8-13 years), have possible differences due to age been explored? 7. Materials and methods (page 9, line 186). Was manual dominance assessed with a validated instrument? 8. Materials and methods (page 17, lines 367-369). Why did you use pain modulation indices only for correlational analyses? 9. Materials and methods (page 19, lines 416-418). This information is contradictory to the information in page 5, lines 89-91 ("15 of the 42 children reported heterogenous problems with recurrent pain [abdominal pain (n=13) headaches (n=7)] which is a considerable number, yet not large enough to allow for a systematic comparison between both groups"). 10. Materials and methods (page 19, lines 418-421). Was the assumption of normality tested? 11. Materials and methods (page 20, lines 444-447). This information should be at the beginning of this subsection ("6.1. Analyses of variance"). 12. Results (pages 23-24, lines 504-508). I do not understand why these results are reported in this sub-section when there is another sub-section dedicated to correlation results. 13. Results (page 28, lines 596-599). Reference to Table 5 is missing. ****** 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. 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: Carolina Sitges ******** [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313636.r001
Revision 1
22 Sep 2024 Author Response 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. We made changes to the manuscript and figures included so that they now meet PLOS ONE’s style requirements. 2. We note that you have indicated that there are restrictions to data sharing for this study. We would like to point out that the data underlying the statistical data analysis as well as the research materials can in general be made available. The data which were collected in this experiment are not freely and directly available because the original approval by the local ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany (#2010-0018) and the informed consent form signed by the participants did not include such direct access. However, the anonymized data will be made available to interested researchers upon request by the local ethics committee. For this purpose, its email address is given in the revised Data Availiability statement. This statement now reads: Data Availability statement: The data which were collected in this experiment are not freely and directly available because the original approval by the local ethics committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Sports Science, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Germany (#2010-0018) and the informed consent form signed by the participants did not include such direct access. However, the anonymized data will be made available to interested researchers upon request by the local ethics committee of the FB06 -Psychology and Sports Science. For this purpose, its contact email (ethikkommission@fb06.uni-giessen.de) is provided in the manuscript. 3. In the online submission form, you indicated that [Insert text from online submission form here]. All PLOS journals now require all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript to be freely available to other researchers, either 1. In a public repository, 2. Within the manuscript itself, or 3. Uploaded as supplementary information. This policy applies to all data except where public deposition would breach compliance with the protocol approved by your research ethics board. If your data cannot be made publicly available for ethical or legal reasons (e.g., public availability would compromise patient privacy), please explain your reasons on resubmission and your exemption request will be escalated for approval. As stated above, direct access of data had not been included either in the original approval by the ethics committee or in the informed consent form signed by participants. However, we can make the anonymized data available to interested researchers upon request to the local ethics committee. 4. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well. We changed the information accordingly. The whole paragraph now reads: For their participation children received 30 €. The study protocol had been approved by the local ethics committee (“Lokale Ethikkommission des Fachbereichs 06 Psychologie and Sportwissenschaften der Justus-Liebig Universität”, LEK-FB06; #2010-0018; https://www.uni-giessen.de/de/fbz/ fb06/psychologie/ethikkommission) stating “Decision: There are no ethical or profession law objections to the project”. Written informed consent was provided by all participating children and their parents. 5. We note that Figure 1 in your submission contain [map/satellite] images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission. The face stimuli were taken from the RaFD face stimuli set. On their homepage (https://rafd.socsci.ru.nl/FAQ.html) the authors answer the question “Am I allowed to use the RaFD faces in publications, e.g. journal articles or presentations about my research?” stating “Yes, in strictly scientific publications RaFD images can be presented as stimulus examples.” Similary, on their homepage (https://kdef.se/faq/using-and-publishing-kdef-and-akdef), the authors of the KDEF stimuli set require scientific users of their stimuli to include information on the KDEF image id in the figure text and to include a list of KDEF ids of all stimuli used in the experiment in the Method section. With regard to publishers, they state that “Researchers may always include sample images from KDEF in his/her manuscript when said manuscript is a doctoral thesis OR is a manuscript submitted to a scientific journal. A publisher may regard this mail as a written consent for such publication, or contact me (contact info below) directly if needed. For the KDEF stimuli, such a journal is typically PLOS ONE, EMOTION, NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA, COGNITION & EMOTION, SOCIAL COGNITIVE & AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE, BIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, NEUROIMAGE, FRONTIERS IN PSYCHOLOGY, JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE or PSYCHONEURO-ENDOCRINOLOGY. Or similar. … Apart from the above publication purposes, the KDEF and AKDEF stimuli may NOT be redistributed or shared without written consent from the copyright holder (Karolinska Institutet, Psychology section …).” We looked at the IAPS website where we could not find any information regarding copyright. We contacted the authors personally but got no reply. Therefore, we removed the two IAPS picture examples from Figure 1. Comments Reviewer #1: 1. Abstract (page 2, line 28). Please consider changing to “…extends previous findings in adults”. Thank you for your suggestion! We changed the sentence accordingly. 2. Introduction (page 3). The introduction is clear and well structured, with references to a theoretical model and previous studies (mainly on adult samples), but is somewhat brief (e.g., no reference is made to the relevance of using psychophysiological measures to measure pain modulation). Previous studies have reported that subjective valence and arousal correspond to facial EMG and SCL, respectively (see https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2020.107974). Thank you for pointing this out! We realized how little information we provided on our use of psychophysiological measures. Therefore, we added a small paragraph including relevant information and references before the final paragraph of the Introduction. The last two paragraphs of the Introduction now read: It is of interest whether pain modulation occurs not only on the level of subjective pain report but also on the level of psychophysiological measures. Pain as highly relevant stimulus induces autonomic arousal as indicated by higher skin conductance level (SCL) (26,27), heart rate (HR) (26,27), and higher activity of the corrugator muscle (assessed by electromyography; EMG), the latter one corresponding to eyebrow squeezing as core element of the facial pain expression (29) and correlating with perceived aversiveness of stimuli (30). A recent study with adults found effects of corrugator EMG, SCL and HR on social and affective pain modulation (REF). The present study aimed to investigate the pain modulating effect of pictures varying in affective quality (positive and negative scenes, happy and neutral faces) and social content (mothers’, strangers’ faces) in children during tonic heat pain stimuli. Pain modulation was assessed by self-report and physiological measures assessing autonomic arousal [(SCL, HR, and corrugator EMG; (18, 19)], and pain-related facial responses, more specifically corrugator muscle activity, a core element of the facial expression of pain (20) (21). We hypothesized that pictures of (a) negative scenes enhance, and positive scenes relieve pain, (b) neutral familiar (mother) and positive unfamiliar faces (happy stranger) alleviate pain. Finally, the influence of parental and child characteristics on children’s pain modulation was tested. 3. Introduction (page 4, lines 59-60). Please consider changing to “…modulating effect of pictures varying in affective quality (positive and negative scenes, happy and neutral faces) and social content (mother, strangers faces)…”. Thank you again for this suggestion! We changed the sentence accordingly. It now reads: The present study aimed to investigate the pain modulating effect of pictures varying in affective quality (positive and negative scenes, happy and neutral faces) and social content (mothers’, strangers’ faces) in children during tonic heat pain stimuli. 4. Introduction (page 4, line 65). Please consider changing to “We hypothesized...”. Thank you for your suggestion! We changed the sentence accordingly. 5. Materials and methods (page 4, lines 73-74). The data collection was carried out about 12 years ago. Why? The data collection was carried out by Katrin Hillmer (maiden name Damm; see ethics form) as part of her PhD. She started her training as clinical psychologist when she was about to finish data collection for this study. The clinical training in Germany takes about five years to complete without much time for other work such as research. Therefore, work on her PhD was delayed. When she finished her clinical training, she got married, moved away from Giessen and had two children all of which further delayed writing up her PhD work. 6. Materials and methods (page 5, lines 85-86). Much of the research indicates that despite altered patterns of interaction in adolescents, parent-child relationships remain important social and emotional resources well beyond the childhood years (see https://doi.org/10.1002/9780471726746.ch11). However, because the sample includes a wide age range (8-13 years), have possible differences due to age been explored? We agree with you that parent-child relationship remains an important social and emotional resource well beyond childhood years. And it might be true that there are age differences, yet, our sample is not large enough to allow for systematic comparisons taking child-parent relationship and changes depending on age into account. Further, it seems likely that also within one age group (e.g. younger or older children) there is considerable variability in quality of parent-child relationship. To account for your comment we included the following sentence in the limitations in the Discussion section: Lastly, due to limiting the burden on participants, we could only assess a small number of potential pain modulation determinants, thereby, omitting others such as mother-child relationship quality. 7. Materials and methods (page 9, line 186). Was manual dominance assessed with a validated instrument? Yes, manual dominance was assessed using the following five items of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (Oldfield, 1971; Williams, 2020): Writing, Drawing, Throwing, Scissors, Toothbrush. 8. Materials and methods (page 17, lines 367-369). Why did you use pain modulation indices only for correlational analyses? We followed a two-step approach. In a first step we exploited the repeated measures design to determine within-subject modulation in pain response depending on the direct comparison of picture categories, particularly affective vs. neutral and social-affective vs. neutral, and time course. A major advantage of this approach is that each participant serves as his/her own control, thus controlling for interindividual differences in the response level. This important information would be lost, if only pain modulation indices, i.e. a difference score, would have been considered. In a second step, in order to determine the relationship between the degree of pain modulation and valence/arousal ratings and questionnaire data we had to rely on pain modulation indices since these allow an estimate of the magnitude of the modulation. 9. Materials and methods (page 19, lines 416-418). This information is contradictory to the information in page 5, lines 89-91 ("15 of the 42 children reported heterogenous problems with recurrent pain [abdominal pain (n=13) headaches (n=7)] which is a considerable number, yet not large enough to allow for a systematic comparison between both groups"). We are sorry for being seemingly contradictory! In the Material and Methods section we continue after the sentence you cite stating that Therefore, we decided to test for statistically significant differences between both groups and to only include children with recurrent pain if they do not differ systematically from healthy children in relevant outcomes. To make this idea clearer, we changed the sentence you cited by removing “yet not large enough to allow for a systematic comparison between both groups”, so that the relevant sentences now read: To be able to better describe our sample of children recruited in local schools, we included a question on recurrent pain. 15 of the 42 children reported heterogenous problems with recurrent pain [abdominal pain (n=13) headaches (n=7)] which is a considerable number. Therefore, in an attempt to control for a possible confounding influence of recurrent pain, we decided to check for statistically significant differences between both groups and to only include children with recurrent pain if they do not differ systematically from healthy children in relevant outcomes. 10. Materials and methods (page 19, lines 418-421). Was the assumption of normality tested? Regression models, including repeated measures ANOVAs, were found to be robust to violations of normality when sphericity assumption is met (e.g. Blanca et al., 2017). Further, our sample size (N >= 30) is sufficiently large to forgo checking for normal distribution, since according to the central limit theorem (Bortz & Schuster, 2010) the sample distribution will be approximately normally distributed. 11. Materials and methods (page 20, lines 444-447). This information should be at the beginning of this subsection ("6.1. Analyses of variance"). We very much agree with you and changed the introductory paragraphs on “Analyses of variance” accordingly, so that they now read: We used the GLM procedure to conduct mixed design ANOVAs to analyze valence and arousal, pain intensity modulation, and psychophysiological correlates depending on picture category and time as within-subject factors. Since a number of children reported recurrent pain experiences we also included recurrent pain (“GROUP”) as between-subject factor to explore potential differences. Significant interactions with GROUP were followed by separate ANOVAS for healthy children and children with recurrent pain. Yet, since there were no significant effects for GROUP in any of the GLM analyses for the subjective and the physiological measures, only the results of the GLM analyses based on the total sample are reported. If the assumption of sphericity was violated, Greenhouse-Geisser corrected degrees of freedom (df) were used, yet, the nominal df are reported. For F-tests partial eta squared (η²) was calculated as effect size with 0.099 as threshold for small, 0.0588 for medium and 0.1379 for large effect sizes according to Cohen (43, 44). 12. Results (pages 23-24, lines 504-508). I do not understand why these results are reported in this sub-section when there is another sub-section dedicated to correlation results. We agree with you and moved this section to the results dedicated to correlations. This section now starts: Correlational analyses Pain threshold, expe Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313636.r002
29 Oct 2024 Decision Letter - José A Hinojosa, Editor Affective and social pain modulation in children – experimental evidence using picture viewing PONE-D-24-21539R1 Dear Dr. Kappesser, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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: I consider that the authors have sufficiently addressed the issues raised during the review process and have improved the manuscript, so I consider it valid for publication. ****** 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: Carolina Sitges ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313636.r003
Formally Accepted
20 Nov 2024 Acceptance Letter - José A Hinojosa, Editor PONE-D-24-21539R1 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Hermann, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, if your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. 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. If we can help with anything else, please email us at customercare@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. José A Hinojosa Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313636.r004

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .