Abstract: In the field of pain, basic research has traditionally focused on the somatosensory dimension of pain and on the mechanisms of acute stimulus-evoked pain. However, less has been done on the affective dimension of pain and on the ongoing spontaneous pain which is more common in clinical settings. This results in the gap between basic research and clinical applications. Conditioned place paradigm, or place conditioning, has been born to a certain extent to solve the problem. It is a classic paradigm to assess the rewarding and addictive properties of drugs. Over the last decade, it begins to be applied in the pain research. This article summarizes the progress of place conditioning in the pain research field, including the employment of conditioned place aversion (CPA) to the emotional dimension of pain, as well as the application of conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm to the persistent pain study and analgesic drug screening. Finally, on the basis of existing research, we point out the future direction of the conditioned place paradigm in the field of pain.

Key words: conditioned place aversion, emotion, conditioned place preference, spontaneous pain, analgesia