Aka "No, the dorsal anterior cingulate is not selective for pain: comment on Lieberman and Eisenberger (2015)"
First, it’s important to remember that Neurosynth can’t directly tell us whether activation is specific to pain (or any other process), because terms in Neurosynth are just that—terms. They’re not carefully assigned task labels, let alone actual mental states. The strict interpretation of a posterior probability of 80% for pain in a dACC voxel is that, if we were to take 11,000 published fMRI studies and pretend that exactly 50% of them included the term ‘pain’ in their abstracts, the presence of activation in the voxel in question should increase our estimate of the likelihood of the term ‘pain’ occurring from 50% to 80%. If this seems rather weak, that’s because it is. It’s something of a leap to go from words in abstracts to processes in people’s heads.
