 There may be reasons to generalize the importance of pain mental imagery in pain perception. One important feature of pain perception is that it is extremely dependent on expectations (when you expect painful sensation, a non-painful stimulus can lead to pain sensation, see Sawamoto et al. 2000; Keltner et al. 2006; Ploghaus et al. 1999). If we consider at least some forms of expectations to be (future-oriented) temporal mental imagery (see Section 5.2 for more on expectations and mental imagery), then these results are easily explained.