This was the tenth year of the Section on Affective Neuroscience and Pain, and the lab continued to progress, recruit new trainees, and plan new studies. Three new fellows (one predoc, two postbacs) joined the lab between October 2023 and September 2024. This progress report describes progress on our main human subjects protocol "Neural and psychological mechanisms of pain perception." The protocol includes five sub-studies designed to a) isolate different aspects of pain modulation, b) compare acute pain modalities (e.g., thermal pain versus shock-induced pain), and c) compare and contrast pain with other hedonic and perceptual domains (e.g., taste). In all studies, we measure decisions about pain experience (self-report) as well as neural and physiological responses to noxious stimuli that cause pain. During analysis, we combine computational modeling with advanced neuroimaging analyses to isolate the neural and psychological mechanisms that mediate the effects of expectations, attention, and emotion on subjective pain. We analyzed, submitted, and published several papers related to this protocol during the review period. Our protocol requires all participants to go through an initial calibration session, following screening. Participants complete questionnaires, and then undergo an adaptive staircase calibration (ASC) procedure that evaluates pain ratings in response to noxious heat stimuli and determines each participants pain threshold, tolerance, and reliability of the association between temperature and pain. Over 350 individuals have completed this procedure to date on this protocol or on our pre-screening protocol (16-AT-0077). We submitted one manuscript based on this ASC procedure in FY24 (Parsons et al., PsyArXiv), in which we tested whether thermode type and stimulus duration impact pain sensitivity as measured using the ASC task. Participants underwent the ASC task twice during a visit, and we compared pain sensitivity as a function of stimulus duration. Pain thresholds and tolerance did not differ as a function of thermode size or stimulus duration, which provides support for large scale analyses that collapse across studies which may vary in stimulus parameters. Consistent with previous work from our lab (Amir et al., 2021, Journal of Pain), we again observed important sex differences in pain sensitivity, driven by higher consistency across thermodes in female participants, relative to males. We completed data collection for three fMRI sub-studies in previous years and have been focusing on analysis and manuscript submission. We are now preparing a manuscript for submission to report results from our second fMRI study, which compared thermal pain with unpleasant and pleasant tastes to evaluate whether effects of learned expectations on brain responses to pain are specific to pain or reflect domain-general value processing. We observe effects of cues on intensity processing in all domains, and find that domain-general impacts of expectancy on brain responses regardless of modality (Zhao*, Lee*, et al., In prep). We are also preparing to submit a manuscript reporting analyses from an fMRI study that compared placebo analgesia with cue-based pain modulation (Necka*, Akintola*, et al., In prep). We find that cues and placebos interact to shape pain, and observe related interactions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Both papers will be submitted in the first half of FY25. During FY24, we completed piloting for one paradigm that measured how expectancy, error-based learning, and verbal instructions impact brain responses in pain and learning-related regions of interest. Unfortunately our pilot study did not support our hypothesis, and the postdoctoral fellow who was leading the project matriculated and is no longer with the lab. We expect data collection on this protocol to resume in FY25 as the new predoctoral fellow designs new experiments investigating the link between learning, pain, and decision-making. In addition to the projects mentioned above, we published several collaborative papers and reviews that are relevant to this line of research. We published the first paper to measure the impact of human ventromedial prefrontal cortex lesions on pain and expectancy-based modulation (Motzkin et al., 2023, Cortex). We find that VMPFC lesions enhance expectancy-based pain modulation without altering pain sensitivity or brain-body relationships. This is consistent with the dissociations between verbal instructions and feedback-driven learning that we have observed in prior work (Atlas et al., 2016 eLife; Atlas et al., 2022 eLife, Atlas 2019). We also published an invited review of the impact of instructions, learning, and expectancy on pain in the journal Annual Review of Neuroscience (Atlas, 2023).