Ann Meulders
Maastricht University, KU Leuven, Apple (Israel), Group Health Cooperative
Papers
17
Total Citations
327
H-Index
11
About
Ann Meulders is a leading experimental psychologist whose research sits at the intersection of associative learning, pain-related fear, and motor behavior. Her primary focus is on understanding how avoidance behavior—the overt act of preventing a painful stimulus—contributes to the transition from acute pain to chronic pain disability. Her most impactful work, the 2016 paper "Acquisition and extinction of operant pain-related avoidance behavior using a 3 degrees-of-freedom robotic arm" (92 citations), introduced a novel, ecologically valid robotic arm-reaching paradigm that transformed how researchers experimentally measure avoidance. This paradigm, along with subsequent studies (e.g., 2017, 63 citations), has shown that fear of pain fundamentally alters movement patterns. Meulders has also made critical contributions to understanding the generalization and return of avoidance, demonstrating that once learned, avoidance can persist even after extinction (2020, 21 citations) and can spread to novel but similar movements (2019, 26 citations). Her work on the boundary conditions of costly avoidance generalization (2021, 16 citations) and the role of ambiguous contexts (2020, 13 citations) has refined the fear-avoidance model of chronic pain. With over 270 citations across her top ten papers, Meulders is a pivotal figure in pain science, providing mechanistic insights that inform prevention and treatment strategies for chronic pain.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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