The Journal of Pain, the leading journal on pain science in the United States, recently collaborated with the American Psychiatric Association’s flagship journal on health psychology, fittingly named Health Psychology, to publish a special issue titled “Accelerating Innovative Strategies for Greater Equity and Inclusion in Pain Care and Research.”
Dr. Vani Mathur, a Texas A&M University associate professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences (PBSI) and a Mayday Fellow, a fellowship focused on communicating pain research to the public and broad academic audiences, co-edited Health Psychology’s special issue on the topic and co-authored two pieces, the introduction to the Health Psychology volume and a collaborative paper that appears in both journals which sets the priorities for future research.
According to Mathur, while each journal published its own special issue, the yearlong effort was collaborative from inception. She said one of the goals of the issues was to “outline the goals of the next generation of research on pain, bring together forward thinking scholars across fields, early career innovators, and people with lived expertise in pain, and springboard new approaches to persistent health crises in pain.”
The Journal of Pain is the official journal of the U.S. Association for the Study of Pain, whose mission is to promote scientific advances that reduce the burden of pain. Health Psychology is the official scientific journal of the Society for Health Psychology (Division 38 of the American Psychological Association), and addresses the complex influences on the human experience in physical health research while maintaining the highest standards of peer-review.