Workshop 1

Applied Contextual Behavioral Science and chronic pain: What? and How?

Lance M McCracken, Uppsala University, Sweden

A Contextual Behavioral approach to psychological or physical health problems can be based in the unique philosophy of science called Contextual Behavioral Science (CBS). To do this has implications for both how research is conducted and equally for the delivery of therapy. In a field that can sometimes feel too fragmented this consistency has appeal. This workshop will start with basic foundational issues, review evidence, provide an update on related assessment issues, and then provide training experiences in clinical methods. It may come as no surprise that this workshop will include a focus on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and its underlying working model, psychological flexibility, but will not end there. While ACT is a good prototype example of applied CBS it is not its last stop.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the workshop participants will 

• Understand the arguments and potential utility for applying an individually-conceived and process-focused approach to behavior change and wellbeing.
• Acquire a set of basic methods for addressing key processes of change based on an extended psychological flexibility model.
• Gain familiarity with some current tools for gathering and analyzing data to support the delivery of the above.

Lance M McCracken is Professor and Head of Division in Clinical Psychology, Psychology Department, Uppsala University, Sweden, since 2018. He completed his PhD at West Virginia University and a post doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins. During his PhD and post doc he produced several of the early studies of the fear-avoidance model of chronic pain. He joined the departments Psychiatry and in Anesthesia and Critical Care at The University of Chicago from 1994 to 2000. During this time, he published the first study of chronic pain and psychological flexibility, the model underlying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), in 1998. He was Clinical Lead at the Bath Center for Pain Services in the UK, beginning in 2000 until 2011. While in Bath he led the organization of the first interdisciplinary pain management center focused on ACT as the working model. He left that post to take up a post as Professor of Behavioral Medicine at King’s College London in 2011 and was there until 2018. While at King’s he and his colleagues published the first UK-based study of an online version of ACT for chronic pain. He has more than 30 years of clinical and research experience in psychological and interdisciplinary approaches to chronic pain and other long-term health conditions, predominantly based in contextual behavioral science. He has over 350 scientific publications and is highly cited, over 35,000 times (H = 95).

References

McCracken L. M. (2023). Personalized pain management: Is it time for process-based therapy for particular people with chronic pain?. European journal of pain (London, England), 27(9), 1044–1055. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejp.2091

McCracken L. M. (2024). Psychological Flexibility, Chronic Pain, and Health. Annual review of psychology, 75, 601–624. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-020223-124335

Sanabria-Mazo, J. P., Giné-Vázquez, I., Cristobal-Narváez, P., Suso-Ribera, C., García-Palacios, A., McCracken, L. M., Hayes, S. C., Hofmann, S. G., Ciarrochi, J., & Luciano, J. V. (2024). Relationship between outcomes and processes in patients with chronic low back pain plus depressive symptoms: idiographic analyses within a randomized controlled trial. Psychotherapy research : journal of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, 1–16. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/10503307.2024.2382429