Ken Craig

Biography

  Dr. Ken Craig is a Professor Emeritus at The University Of British Columbia.  

Research Interest

My research seeks to expand our understanding of pain in the interests of improving clinical management by focusing upon psychological and social parameters.  Pain is often not recognized, inadequately assessed, underestimated, and either poorly managed or ignored.  The importance of the social environment in dictating whether an individual is exposed to pain, how it is experience and expressed and how others assess and treat the individual in pain have led to a general framework for organizing our understanding of pain, the social communications model.  Within this framework, we have explored how the family and cultural environment influence how children appraise and react emotionally during pain, how various forms of verbal and nonverbal communication inform others about the nature and severity of an individual’s pain and how health care professionals and others assess and make decisions concerning care delivery.  We have several current interests:  a) pain assessment in infants, children and populations with a limited ability to communicate, b) the distinctions in pain expression between automatic/reflexive and purposive/controlled manifestations, c) the relative importance of different cues and displays for accurate and biased observer judgements, and d) the application of computer vision and machine learning technologies to the objective assessment of pain .