Rich Harrison

I am a postgraduate researcher in the CINN Pain Lab at the University of Reading. My research interests target psychological processes that are associated with how the brain is able to modulate (tone down) the experience of pain. During my PhD, I focused on the concept of mindfulness, and how this is associated with neural attentional mechanisms which may enable people to manage their pain more effectively. As well as this, I examined the underlying neural mechanisms of pain assessment in an attempt to clarify why they appear to have predictive ability when it comes to postsurgical chronic pain. I was curious as to why relatively arbitrary pain experiments (such as being exposed to two simultaneous pain stimuli) would have any consequences for predicting how people are likely to experience real organic pain after surgery, as well as elsewhere in the real world. Overall, my main interest is trying to understand why some people are likely to be vulnerable to pain, whereas others show an innate resistance and may never be encumbered by it. Being able to improve our understanding of this can help us improve our knowledge overall in the field, but also practically, can be applied to predictive assessments across a range of medical domains to try and identify those that will benefit from additional support. I have recently created a new website providing a bit more detail about our research and projects, I will always be aiming to keep this updated and will be adding new material regularly. Please feel free to visit or ask me any questions that you may find interesting. Always happy to share and talk!