Brain Representations of Affective Valence and Intensity in Sustained Pleasure and Pain

ABSTRACT Pleasure and pain are two opposites that compete and influence each other, implying the existence of brain systems that integrate them to generate modality-general affective experiences. Here, we examined the brain’s general affective codes (i.e., affective valence and intensity) across sustained pleasure and pain through an fMRI experiment ( n = 58). We found that the distinct sub-populations of voxels within the ventromedial and lateral prefrontal cortices, the orbitofrontal cortex, the anterior insula, and the amygdala were involved in decoding affective valence versus intensity, which was replicated in an independent test dataset ( n = 62). The affective valence and intensity models were connected to distinct large-scale brain networks—the intensity model to the ventral attention network and the valence model to the limbic and default mode networks. Overall, this study identified the brain representations of affective valence and intensity across pleasure and pain, promoting the systems-level understanding of human affective experiences.