| Summary: | Physical health conditions that can cause pain, such as obesity and osteoporosis, are common in schizophrenia. Research suggests that people with schizophrenia have reduced sensitivity to pain and reduced motivation, which could lead to a lack of help-seeking behavior in response to these physical health conditions. As pain and motivation share widespread neurobiological overlap, factors relating to motivation, including the effort expended to obtain rewards and the response to those rewards, could possibly help explain differences in pain sensitivity. The overlap between pain and motivation, therefore, may exist in those with both normative and impaired levels of motivation. Thus, the goals of this dissertation were to 1) explore associations between experimental pain sensitivity and motivation (i.e., willingness to exert effort for rewards and the trait-based tendencies in responding to rewards) in a group of community-dwelling adults; 2) replicate prior findings suggesting decreased experimental pain sensitivity in schizophrenia; 3) explore associations between experimental pain sensitivity measures and motivational impairment, as measured by a standardized clinical-interview, within schizophrenia. Results indicated no significant associations between motivational impairment and pain sensitivity in schizophrenia; however, results from the community sample showed an association between pain tolerance and willingness to exert effort for rewards, such that for individuals with higher pain tolerance, the amount of effort expenditure required to obtain rewards was more likely to deter participants from expending effort. These findings further suggest associations between pain and motivation and speak to the promise of using measures of motivation to better understand pain sensitivity differences in schizophrenia. === 2023-05-14T00:00:00Z
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