Publications by authors named "Ama Kissi"

Article Synopsis
  • This study explores how perceptions of racial discrimination, health stigma, and pain-related injustice affect the functioning of Black youth with sickle cell disease (SCD).
  • The sample consisted of 30 non-Hispanic Black youths (avg. age 11.3) and utilized statistical analysis to examine relationships between these perceptions and outcomes like functional disability, anxiety, and depression.
  • Findings indicate that perceived racial discrimination and pain-related injustice significantly predict functional disability, while pain-related injustice is linked to anxiety symptoms, highlighting the negative impact of stigma and discrimination on health outcomes in this group.
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Objective: To explore and characterise the discrimination and racism experienced in healthcare from the perspective of Dutch patients with a migration background.

Design: This was a qualitative phenomenological study incorporating an inductive thematic analysis of the answers provided to a free form online survey. Descriptive and differential analyses were conducted for the closed-ended questions.

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Research documents racial disparities in chronic low back pain (CLBP). Few studies have examined racial disparities in movement-related appraisals and no studies have examined anticipatory appraisals prior to or pain behaviors during functional activities among individuals with CLBP. This cross-sectional study examined racial differences in anticipatory appraisals of pain, concerns about harm, and anxiety, appraisals of pain and anxiety during movement, and observed pain behaviors during 3 activities of daily living (supine-to-standing bed task, sitting-to-standing chair task, floor-to-waist lifting task) in a sample (N = 126) of non-Hispanic Black (31.

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Pediatric patients with invisible symptomology, such as chronic pain syndromes, are more likely to experience pain-related stigma and associated discrimination by others, including medical providers, peers, school personnel, and family members. The degree of this pain-related stigma may depend on several social dimensions, including observer (e.g.

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Introduction: To limit the spread of COVID-19, many countries, including Belgium, have installed physical distancing measures. Yet, adherence to these newly installed behavioral measures has been described as challenging and effortful. Based on the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) model, this study performed an in-depth evaluation of when, why, and how people deviated from the physical distancing measures.

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Research has demonstrated racial disparities in pain care such that Black patients often receive poorer pain care than White patients. Little is known about mechanisms accounting for the emergence of such disparities. The present study had 2 aims.

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Background: The COVID-19 pandemic requires massive and rapid behavior change. The Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) describes personal determinants that play a key role in behavior change. This study investigated whether these determinants are associated with adherence to physical distancing measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (i.

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Under some conditions, people persist in their attempts to control their pain even when no such control is possible. Theory suggests that such pain-control attempts arise from actual pain experiences. Across 3 experiments we examined how (1) losing control over pain and (2) instructions concerning pain, moderated pain-control attempts.

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Background: Adherence to inaccurate rules has been viewed as a characteristic of human rule-following (i.e., the rule-based insensitivity effect; RBIE) and has been thought to be exacerbated in individuals suffering from clinical conditions.

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The concept of rule-governed behavior or instructional control has been widely recognized for many decades within the behavior-analytic literature. It has also been argued that the human capacity to formulate and follow increasingly complex rules may undermine sensitivity to direct contingencies of reinforcement, and that excessive reliance upon rules may be an important variable in human psychological suffering. Although the concept of rules would appear to have been relatively useful within behavior analysis, it seems wise from time to time to reflect upon the utility of even well-established concepts within a scientific discipline.

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Research on chronic pain has traditionally focused on how direct pain experiences lead to maladaptive thoughts, feelings, and actions that set the stage for, and maintain, pain-related disability. Yet the capacity for language (and more specifically verbal instructions or rules) to put people into indirect contact with pain has never been systematically investigated. In this article, we introduce a novel theoretical perspective on verbal processes and discuss how the study of verbal rules may increase our understanding of both maladaptive and adaptive functioning in chronic pain.

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Pain has the capacity to interfere with daily tasks. Although task interference by pain is largely unintentional, it can be controlled to a certain extent. Such top-down control over pain has been believed to be reduced in patients with fibromyalgia (FM).

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Within relational frame theory, a distinction has been made between three types of rule-governed behavior known as pliance, tracking, and augmenting. This review examined whether there is support for the concepts of pliance, tracking, and augmenting in the experimental analysis of behavior; whether these concepts refer to distinct functional classes of behavior; and how these concepts have been operationalized in experimental (behavioral-analytic) research. Given that the concepts of pliance, tracking, and augmenting were first defined by Zettle and Hayes, we confined our review to studies published in or after 1982.

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