As an unpleasant subjective feeling and emotional experience

pain has a negative impact on the physical and mental health of patients. In the early years

the research concerning pain mostly focused on the sensory-discriminative component. With the development of modern medicine

people found that the generation of affective-emotional component of pain has its unique physiological mechanism

and thus carried out a lot of in-depth research. The anterior cingulate cortex(ACC) is the main brain area activated by affective pain

and the regulation of acupuncture on pain aversion is mainly related to it. The mechanism includes various signal pathways

such as extracellular regulated protein kinases-mitogen activated protein kinase-cAMP-response element binding protein pathway

adenylate cyclase 1 protein kinase Mζ-glutamate receptor 1 pathway

contains many biomolecules

such as opioid receptors

neuropeptide S and its receptor

and refers to microglia at the cellular level. This article reviewed the neural mechanism of ACC involved in affective pain and the role of acupuncture played in this process.