Christine van Vliet
Papers
3
Total Citations
42
H-Index
3
About
Christine van Vliet is a leading researcher in the experimental psychopathology of chronic pain, specializing in the mechanisms of pain-related fear and avoidance behavior. Her work critically extends the fear-avoidance model by demonstrating how avoidance—once adaptive—can paradoxically sustain and amplify pain-related fear, even when the original threat is no longer present. In her highly cited 2019 study (17 citations), she showed that when avoidance behavior becomes ineffective, it triggers increases in both pain-related fear and pain itself, revealing a self-perpetuating cycle central to chronic disability. Her 2020 paper (13 citations) further demonstrated that performing avoidance movements in novel, ambiguous contexts heightens threat perception and fear, while her 2021 study (12 citations) explored how avoidance generalizes to conceptually related contexts—such as moving from indoor to outdoor settings—contributing to the spread of disability. Using innovative operant robotic-arm paradigms, van Vliet has provided rigorous experimental evidence for how cognitive and contextual factors maintain maladaptive avoidance. Her work has profound implications for understanding the transition from acute to chronic pain and for designing exposure-based interventions that target avoidance generalization.
Research Focus
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Top Papers
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