Melanie Beeckman1, Sean Hughes1, Liesbet Goubert1
1) Belgium
Chronic pain is a common health problem among adolescents. Research has mainly focused on mechanisms that contribute to maladaptive functioning (e.g., fear and avoidance). Others have started to investigate resilience mechanisms that can lead to successful functioning (e.g., acceptance). Yet this research has almost exclusively relied on self-report procedures that measure individuals’ ‘explicit’ thoughts, feelings, and actions. A more sophisticated understanding of pain-related functioning may require that automatic thoughts, feelings, and actions are also taken into account. Therefore, we are currently developing a version of the Implicit Relational Assessment Procedure (IRAP) to assess implicit (pain-related) fear, avoidance, and acceptance.
Two IRAPs were administered to 25 healthy adolescents (11-17 years; recruited through schools) to measure their implicit responses to acute pain. Participants were asked to engage in a 1-minute cold pressor task (CPT) and a neutral water task before completing willingness-fear and approach-avoidance IRAPs. They were then asked to complete a second CPT while performing a tone detection task. Participants also completed pain-related self-reports.
On average most (92%) adolescents were able to meet IRAP performance criteria. Participants showed no implicit willingness, fear, approach or avoidance responses towards the acute pain task, although implicit responses were found towards the neutral task. Only implicit and explicit willingness responses were (positively) related to one another. Although explicit pain-related responses did relate to performance on the painful CPT and tone detection task, implicit responses did not.
The IRAP can be used with adolescents in a pain-related context. In a forthcoming study, the IRAP will be adapted to measure implicit responses in adolescents with chronic pain. Again, relations with explicit cognition and performance on a daily (painful) behavioral task will be explored.
This study was supported by a grant of the “Special Research Fund” of Ghent University (BOF 24J.2015.0005.01).
