Publications by authors named "Dimitri M L Van Ryckeghem"

Background: Children's inability to forget the negative aspects of a painful event is associated with more anticipatory anxiety at an upcoming pain task and lower pain thresholds; however, the impact of forgetting on children's pain outcomes has not been examined. Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) was experimentally induced to investigate whether children would (1) forget more negative details of a previous painful autobiographic event and; (2) report better pain-related outcomes for an unrelated pain task (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study looked at how paying attention to pain can affect how bad the pain feels and how much it affects daily life.
  • They tested two groups: healthy people and those with chronic pain, to see if changing focus on pain would make a difference.
  • The results showed that while healthy people didn't show a connection, people with chronic pain who could easily change their attention tended to feel more pain and have more problems in life because of it.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Contemporary pain models highlight cognitive-processing biases (ie, attention bias [AB], interpretation bias [IB], and memory bias [MB]) as key processes that contribute to poor pain outcomes. However, existing research has yielded inconsistent findings regarding the presence and impact of these biases on pain outcomes. Recognizing the need to explore these biases simultaneously, contemporary pain models suggest that cognitive biases (CBs) are interrelated, and may have a combined impact upon pain problems.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Negatively biased pain memories can lead to worse pain outcomes in children, influenced by attention bias to pain and parental communication.
  • A study found that a more supportive parental narrative style—using fewer yes-no questions and more emotional vocabulary—can reduce the negative impact of children's attention bias on their pain memories.
  • The results highlight the need for parents to adapt their storytelling approach based on their child's tendency to focus on pain to help mitigate the development of these harmful memories.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The current study investigated the influence of children's ability to flexibly shift attention toward and away from pain information on the development of negatively biased pain memories, thereby employing a direct measure of attention control reliant on behavioral responses in the context of pain (ie, an attention switching task). The direct influence of children's attention-shifting ability and pain catastrophizing as well as the moderating role of this shifting ability in the relationship between pain catastrophizing and the development of negatively biased pain memories was examined. Healthy school children (N = 41; 9-15 years old) received painful heat stimuli and completed measures of state and trait pain catastrophizing.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

There is an ongoing debate about whether pain can be classically conditioned, but surprisingly, evidence is scarce. Here, we report 3 experiments investigating this idea. In a virtual reality task, healthy participants were approached and touched near or on their hand with a coloured pen (blue or yellow).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Itch is unpleasant and induces the urge to scratch. This is adaptive to remove the itch-inducing stimulus from the skin. Accordingly, itch draws attention to protect our bodily integrity.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Linguistic stimuli are commonly used in research to investigate the processing of pain. To provide researchers with a dataset of pain-related and non-pain-related linguistic stimuli, this research investigated 1) the associative strength between pain-related words and the pain construct; 2) the pain-relatedness ratings of pain words; and 3) the variability in the relatedness of pain words within pain word classifications (eg, sensory pain words). In Study 1, 194 pain-related and matched non-pain-related words were retrieved by reviewing the pain-related attentional bias literature.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Youth pain-related injustice appraisals are associated with adverse functioning; however, mechanisms by which injustice appraisals exert their impact have yet to be elucidated. Adult injustice literature suggests anger, sadness, and attention bias to anger (AB) as potential mechanisms. This study examined the effects of injustice appraisals in a healthy youth sample by applying a justice violation manipulation.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Researchers studied how people with chronic pain pay attention to pain-related information differently than those without pain.
  • They analyzed 2008 studies and found 34 that focused on this issue, including one with 15 studies for deeper statistics.
  • The findings showed that people with chronic pain tend to pay more attention to information about pain, both in how it feels and how it affects emotions, but the reasons behind this weren't perfectly clear.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • This study looks at how kids remember pain and how their parents talk about it.
  • Researchers found that kids who pay more attention to pain cues remember their pain more negatively if their parents talk a lot about the pain experience.
  • It shows that parents should change their talking style based on how their child reacts to pain to help them cope better.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Rapidly attending towards potentially harmful stimuli to prevent possible damage to the body is a critical component of adaptive behavior. Research suggests that individuals display an attentional bias, i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study investigated how a brief educational video about pain affects children's memories of pain intensity and fear after undergoing a simulated pain experience.
  • It involved 77 children aged 8-15, with some watching the video before a heat pain task, while others did not.
  • Results indicated that children who watched the video recalled experiencing less pain compared to those who did not, and the way parents talked about pain influenced these memories, suggesting that educating both children and parents could help manage pain perceptions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: To date, research has found variable success in using attentional bias modification training (ABMT) procedures in pain samples. Several factors could contribute to these mixed findings, including boredom and low motivation. Indeed, training paradigms are repetitive, which can lead to disengagement and high dropout rates.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Many patients experience pain after surgery. Psychological factors such as emotion and cognition are shown to be associated with the development of acute and chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP). Therefore, the question arises whether targeting these psychological factors can reduce negative postsurgical outcomes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

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.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Whether parental presence during their children's painful medical procedures is advantageous with regard to children's pain-related outcomes is questionable. Research on this topic is equivocal, and additional questions, such as whether levels of parental involvement may play a role as well, remain to be addressed. The purpose of this systematic review is to summarize and critically appraise the literature on the impact of parental presence vs absence during their children's painful medical procedures on the child's pain-related outcomes.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

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.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Questions have been raised about whether items of alexithymia scales assess the construct alexithymia and its key features, and no other related constructs. This study assessed the (discriminant) content validity of the most widely used alexithymia scale, i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Adopting an active lifestyle is key in the management of type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM). Nevertheless, the majority of individuals with T2DM fails to do so. Additionally, individuals with T2DM are likely to experience mental (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Pain neuroscience education (PNE) has received increasing research attention demonstrating beneficial effects on pain-related outcomes in adults. Conversely, studies on the effectiveness of PNE in children are scarce.

Methods: This study investigated the effect of a pain educational video intervention on child pain-related outcomes (i.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF