Maité Van Alboom

Persistent health disparities, rooted in unequal distributions of power, resources and opportunities, emphasize the urgent need for more inclusive research practices in health psychology. This paper presents citizen advisory groups, composed of individuals with lived experience of health inequities, as a feasible approach to foster such practices. Citizen advisory groups provide researchers with insight into the lived experience of these individuals, facilitating research that is aligned with their context and needs. Compared to full-scale participatory research, these groups require relatively modest resources while still enabling meaningful community engagement.In the Netherlands and Flanders, citizen advisory groups have gained traction in recent years. Drawing on experiences from existing groups, literature, and researchers’ input from conference roundtables, this paper aims to disseminate experiences with, and lessons learned from working with advisory groups. Thereby, this paper contributes to researchers’ knowledge about the use and implementation of advisory groups. This helps to support researchers in assessing whether a citizen advisory group is suitable for their work, aiming to lower the barriers to start one. This paper covers how citizen advisory groups may overcome researchers’ barriers to inclusive research, the value of advisory groups across different phases of the research process, and how to overcome challenges in the implementation and sustainability of citizen advisory groups. Ultimately, the paper presents citizen advisory groups as a concrete step towards more inclusive research practices in health psychology.

To explore the relationships between pain medication use and quality of life in individuals with chronic non-cancer pain (CNCP), with a focus on three domains: pain severity, well-being and psychosocial functioning, and stigma experiences. A secondary analysis was conducted using cross-sectional data from an online Belgian survey. The sample consisted of 332 participants with CNCP (M_age = 54 years; 82% women; 18% men). Participants were categorized into four groups: individuals taking (1) no medication, (2) non-opioids, (3) mild/weak opioids, or (4) strong opioids. Pain grades were assigned using the Graded Chronic Pain Scale. Distribution of frequencies and Spearman's correlation were calculated for pain severity, while (multivariate) analysis of variance was used for all psychosocial outcomes. Participants classified in higher pain grades were more likely to use stronger opioids. Significant differences emerged between medication groups in well-being and functioning, as well as stigma experiences. Specifically, individuals in the strongest opioid group reported the highest levels of pain interference, social isolation, enacted and internalized stigma, alongside the lowest levels of physical functioning and social participation. After controlling for pain severity, only differences between medication groups in pain interference and physical functioning remained significant. In contrast, pain severity showed significant main effects across all outcomes: pain interference, physical functioning, social participation, social isolation, depressive symptoms, anxiety, and overall stigma. This study emphasizes the need for a multidisciplinary treatment approach, given that both pain severity and opioid use were associated with poorer quality of life among individuals with CNCP.

ObjectivesChronic pain (CP) is a multifaceted condition that requires a comprehensive biopsychosocial approach involving different healthcare disciplines and providers for effective treatment. When multiple healthcare providers are involved in the treatment, integration within interdisciplinary healthcare networks and effective communication become crucial, but challenging. The current study aimed to examine the structure and composition of the healthcare network of individuals with CP and their association with treatment satisfaction, well-being (depression, anxiety, anger, social isolation), and functioning (pain interference). Key network characteristics of interest were healthcare network density, the centrality of the general practitioner in the network, and healthcare discipline heterogeneity. MethodsA four-wave online questionnaire was completed by 232 individuals with CP (179 women, mean age of 49 years). ResultsAnalyses of 2,745 healthcare relations showed a robust association between network density and perceived treatment satisfaction; however, no significant associations were observed with depression, anxiety, anger, pain interference, and social isolation. Additionally, the findings showed that participants who perceived more communication between their GP and other healthcare providers also reported greater treatment satisfaction; but there was no association with well-being or functioning. Contrary to expectations, while the number of different healthcare disciplines was not related to depression, anger, or pain interference, it was positively associated with anxiety and social isolation. DiscussionThese findings highlight the complexity of healthcare networks in CP management and suggest that examining healthcare networks from a structural perspective may offer valuable insights for future research, clinical practice, and policy development.

The psychological and behavioural sciences have long struggled with issues of replicability and reproducibility, often attributed to poorly defined psychological constructs. Clear and precise construct definitions are essential for advancing theory development, improving measurement validity, and fostering scientific communication. This study aimed to develop comprehensive definitions for key constructs within the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA), a widely used model in health psychology. Using a structured, iterative methodology adapted from Podsakoff et al. (2016), we focused on refining definitions for action planning, coping planning, self-efficacy, and action control—core constructs in the model’s post-motivational phase. The resulting definitions are intended for inclusion in the Decentralised Construct Taxonomy (DCT), promoting transparency and consistency in construct usage. This work offers a replicable framework for construct definition development, with implications extending beyond the HAPA model to the broader behavioural sciences.

Fibromyalgia lacks a coherent illness and treatment model, which includes a set of conceptual ideas shaping individuals’ perceptions and understandings of pain, its causing and maintaining factors, and management strategies. Developing personalized illness models that can guide treatment plans and alleviate feelings of uncertainty is of crucial importance. This study investigates how individuals with fibromyalgia develop a personal illness and treatment model while navigating the current healthcare system and explore their experiences during this process. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 15 cis women with fibromyalgia, which were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The analysis produced two themes, each including two subthemes. The first theme encompassed the difficulty of developing a comprehensive illness model due to the biomedical perspective of the healthcare system; the second theme described the importance of participants (re)gaining ownership and agency over their pain management, by constructing their own illness and treatment model. Most women in this study got stuck in the biomedical healthcare web not being provided with a clear illness and treatment model. Consequently, most women gained ownership of this process by developing their personal illness and treatment model (self-empowerment). Conversely, a few women felt powerless and paralyzed. This study underscores the importance of promoting patient empowerment in chronic pain management. Agency is undervalued in the treatment of fibromyalgia and warrants more thorough examination. Increasing knowledge about agency could enhance treatment effectiveness.

Graph embedding approaches have been attracting increasing attention in recent years mainly due to their universal applicability. They convert network data into a vector space in which the graph structural information and properties are maximumly preserved. Most existing approaches, however, ignore the rich information about interactions between nodes, i.e., edge attribute or edge type. Moreover, the learned embeddings suffer from a lack of explainability, and cannot be used to study the effects of typed structures in edge-attributed networks. In this paper, we introduce a framework to embed edge type information in graphlets and generate a Typed-Edge Graphlets Degree Vector (TyE-GDV). Additionally, we extend two combinatorial approaches, i.e., the colored graphlets and heterogeneous graphlets approaches to edge-attributed networks. Through applying the proposed method to a case study of chronic pain patients, we find that not only the network structure of a patient could indicate his/her perceived pain grade, but also certain social ties, such as those with friends, colleagues, and healthcare professionals, are more crucial in understanding the impact of chronic pain. Further, we demonstrate that in a node classification task, the edge-type encoded graphlets approaches outperform the traditional graphlet degree vector approach by a significant margin, and that TyE-GDV could achieve a competitive performance of the combinatorial approaches while being far more efficient in space requirements.

Adolescents with chronic pain (ACP) often experience impairments in their social functioning. Little is known about the consequences of these impairments on peer relationships of ACP. This study applied social network analysis to examine whether adolescents with more pain problems are less popular (RQ1), adolescents with similar pain problems name each other more often as being part of the same peer group (RQ2), dyads with an adolescent experiencing more pain problems report less positive (eg, support) and more negative (eg, conflict) friendship qualities (RQ3), and positive and negative friendship qualities moderate the relationship between pain and emotional distress (RQ4). This study used data from the first wave of a longitudinal study (N = 2767) which followed up Swedish adolescents from 19 public schools. For RQ1-3, Multiple Regression Quadratic Assignment Procedure was applied. For RQ4, standard multilevel models with observations of adolescents nested within schools were estimated. Results showed that ACP were not less popular than adolescents without chronic pain. Second, ACP nominated each other more often as being part of the same peer group. Third, results regarding friendship quality showed that adolescents with more pain problems perceived the relationship with their friends as less positive (eg, support) and more negative (eg, conflict) than adolescents with less pain problems. Finally, positive and negative friendship qualities moderated the relationship between pain and emotional distress. This study contributes to the literature on the importance of peer relationships of ACP. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.