Alexandre Heeren

Alexandre Heeren
Catholic University of Louvain | UCLouvain · Psychological Sciences Research Institute

PhD

About

188
Publications
146,758
Reads
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7,335
Citations
Introduction
Alexandre Heeren, Ph.D., is a Research Professor and FNRS Research Associate (tenured research fellowship from the F.R.S.-FNRS Belgian National Science Foundation) at the Psychological Science Research Institute of UCLouvain, Belgium. His research focuses on the cognitive and affective processes involved in anxiety- and stress-related psychopathology. Find out more about his research by visiting the ResearchGate's research section or his lab's website (www.heerenlab.com)
Additional affiliations
November 2017 - present
Catholic University of Louvain
Position
  • Research Associate
October 2015 - November 2017
Harvard University
Position
  • PostDoc Position
August 2013 - November 2013
Harvard University
Position
  • Visiting scholar (post-doctoral research fellow)
Education
September 2010 - September 2011
Catholic University of Louvain
Field of study
  • Evidence-based Psychotherapy
October 2008 - March 2012
Catholic University of Louvain
Field of study
  • Psychological Sciences
September 2007 - June 2009

Publications

Publications (188)
Article
Full-text available
Network analyses have become increasingly common within the field of psychology, and temporal network analyses in particular are quickly gaining traction, with many of the initial articles earning substantial interest. However, substantial heterogeneity exists within the study designs and methodology, rendering it difficult to form a comprehensive...
Article
Full-text available
The notion of climate anxiety has gained traction in the last years. Yet uncertainty remains regarding the variations of climate anxiety across demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, age) and its associations with adaptive (i.e., pro-environmental) behaviors. Moreover, the point-estimate proportion of people frequently experiencing climate anxi...
Article
Full-text available
Rumination is a transdiagnostic correlate and risk factor for mental disorders. However, few studies have explored rumination and its components in everyday life, or their associations with other transdiagnostic processes, such as deficits in attention control, which may be an explanatory mechanism or consequence of rumination. Inspired by the Nole...
Article
Research on the emotional experience of climate change has become a hot topic. Yet uncertainties remain regarding the interplay between climate change-related emotions (i.e., eco-anxiety, eco-anger, eco-sadness), general emotions (i.e., regardless of climate change), and pro-environmental behaviors. Most previous research has focused on cross-secti...
Article
Full-text available
La notion d'écoanxiété résume différentes souffrances psychiques associées aux conditions environnementales. Elle renvoie à une variété d'états de détresse vécus en réponse à la crise écologique. On en retrouve de nombreuses autres définitions allant d'« une peur chronique de la catastrophe environnementale » ou d'une « anxiété ressentie en réponse...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction A limited number of studies have explored the connection between eco-anxiety, anxiety, and depression in adolescents. However, the relation between eco-anxiety and suicide remains unexamined. This cross-sectional observational study aims to bridge this gap by investigating the correlation between eco-anxiety intensity and suicide risk...
Article
Full-text available
Network approaches to psychopathology have become increasingly common in mental health research, with many theoretical and methodological developments quickly gaining traction. This article illustrates contemporary practices in applying network analytical tools, bridging the gap between network concepts and their empirical applications. We explain...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Rumination is conceptualized as a critical transdiagnostic vulnerability and maintenance factor for affective dysregulation and related emotional disorders. Recent research has pointed to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a novel therapeutic tool for alleviating rumination, especially stress-induced rumination. However, t...
Preprint
Full-text available
Aversive emotions like anxiety supposedly serve adaptive purposes. Yet, a consensual framework that defines the evolutionary function of anxiety and distinguishes between its (mal)adaptive forms is lacking. The present work addresses this gap through the elaboration of a theoretical approach that integrates behavioral, biological, and cognitive pro...
Article
Full-text available
Neuroanatomical findings on youth anxiety disorders are notoriously difficult to replicate, small in effect size and have limited clinical relevance. These concerns have prompted a paradigm shift toward highly powered (that is, big data) individual-level inferences, which are data driven, transdiagnostic and neurobiologically informed. Here we buil...
Article
Full-text available
Neuroanatomical findings on youth anxiety disorders are notoriously difficult to replicate, small in effect size and have limited clinical relevance. These concerns have prompted a paradigm shift toward highly powered (that is, big data) individual-level inferences, which are data driven, transdiagnostic and neurobiologically informed. Here we buil...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objective: Rumination is conceptualized as a critical transdiagnostic vulnerability and maintenance factor for affective dysregulation and related emotional disorders. Recent research has pointed to transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a novel therapeutic tool for alleviating rumination, especially stress-induced rumination. However, t...
Article
Full-text available
En 2022, le deuxième volet du sixième rapport du Groupe Intergouver-nemental d'Experts sur l'évolution du Climat (GIEC) consacrait un chapitre complet à l'impact du dérèglement climatique sur la santé, incluant santé physique, communautaire et mentale. Concernant la santé mentale, les auteurs rapportent l'observation d'une variété d'im-pacts liés à...
Preprint
Full-text available
The trajectories and patterns in our emotions are essential to understanding our affective experience, which is not stationary but ebbs and flows. This study focuses on affect anchored in the context of parenting: daily emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from children, and feeling fed up. We specifically examined whether dysfunction in parent...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research on the emotional experience of climate change has become a hot topic. Yet uncertainties remain regarding the interplay between climate change-related emotions (i.e., eco-anxiety, eco-anger, eco-sadness), general emotions (i.e., regardless of climate change), and pro-environmental behaviors. Most previous research has focused on cross-secti...
Preprint
Full-text available
Rumination, characterized by repetitive negative thoughts about one's emotions and experiences, is a transdiagnostic process involved in various emotional disorders. While statistical tools from affective dynamics have been largely applied to elucidate the temporal dynamics of affect, it has seldom been used in rumination research. In this study, w...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background. Rumination is a transdiagnostic correlate and risk factor for mental disorders. However, few studies have explored rumination and its components in everyday life, or their associations with other transdiagnostic processes, such as deficits in attention control, which may be an explanatory mechanism or consequence of rumination. Inspired...
Preprint
Full-text available
Parental burnout, which includes emotional exhaustion, emotional distance, and feeling fed up with parenting, is a chronic and potentially debilitating stress condition that has become highly prevalent in Western countries. Yet uncertainty remains about parents’ daily experience of burnout and how their experiences interact with their family enviro...
Article
Full-text available
Parental burnout is a growing subject of research, but thus far this research has not examined whether the features of parental burnout fluctuate over time. Moreover, parenting and parental burnout are inextricable from their family context. Therefore, a critical next step involves examining how parental burnout features temporally unfold and inter...
Article
Full-text available
Depression is associated with reduced executive functioning. Still, we lack a more detailed understanding of the factors explaining this association. Addressing several limitations in the previous literature, we examine whether poor executive functioning is associated with specific depression symptoms using a network approach. The sample consisted...
Article
Full-text available
Many parents have days where they encounter emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from their children, and feeling fed up with being a parent. Some parents experience these characteristics to a severe extent-a clinical phenomenon termed parental burnout. Parental burnout arises when parents chronically endure severe stress without sufficient res...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Intolerance to uncertainty is a trait-like disposition largely studied in psychopathology and known to be involved in many psychological disorders. Yet, the very operationalization of this construct has prompted debate in the literature. Three different models have regularly been discussed: a correlated two-factor solution, a bifactoria...
Article
Full-text available
There is limited convergence in neuroimaging investigations into volumes of subcortical brain regions in social anxiety disorder (SAD). The inconsistent findings may arise from variations in methodological approaches across studies, including sample selection based on age and clinical characteristics. The ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group initiated a gl...
Preprint
Full-text available
Intolerance to uncertainty is a trait-like disposition largely studied in psychopathology and known to be involved in many psychological disorders. Yet, the very operationalization of this construct has prompted debate in the literature. Three different models have regularly been discussed: a correlated two-factor solution, a bifactorial solution,...
Article
Full-text available
What is it to be “an ideal parent”? Does the answer differ across countries and social classes? To answer these questions in a way that minimizes bias and ethnocentrism, we used open-ended questions to explore ideal-parent beliefs among 8,357 mothers and 3,517 fathers from 37 countries. Leximancer Semantic Network Analysis was utilized to first det...
Preprint
Full-text available
Neuroimaging studies point to neurostructural abnormalities in youth with anxiety disorders. Yet, findings are based on small-scale studies, often with small effect sizes, and have limited generalizability and clinical relevance. These issues have prompted a paradigm shift in the field towards highly powered (i.e., big data) individual-level infere...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Research indicates that rumination can be viewed as a dynamic process that fluctuates over time, within hours and days. An increasing number of intensive longitudinal studies on rumination are accordingly being conducted and published using experiencing sampling methodology (ESM), a technique with measurements in everyday life. Yet, thi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Objective: Research indicates that rumination can be viewed as a dynamic process that fluctuates over time, within hours and days. An increasing numberof intensive longitudinal studies on rumination are accordingly being conducted and published using experiencing sampling methodology (ESM), a technique with measurements in everyday life. Yet, this...
Article
Full-text available
Research has pointed to startling worldwide rates of people reporting considerable anxiety vis-à-vis climate change. Yet, uncertainties remain regarding how climate anxiety’s cognitive-emotional features and daily life functional impairments interact with one another and with climate change experience, pro-environmental behaviors, and general worry...
Preprint
Full-text available
Research has pointed to startling worldwide rates of people reporting considerable anxiety vis-à-vis climate change. Yet, uncertainties remain regarding how climate anxiety’s cognitive-emotional features and daily life functional impairments interact with one another and with climate change experience, pro-environmental behaviors, and general worry...
Article
Full-text available
Parental burnout results from chronic stress in parenting, and it can be accompanied by harmful behaviors such as parental neglect and violence (Mikolajczak & Roskam, 2018). Network analysis examines psychological phenomena within a system of its constituents, and thus it is promising for understanding the distinct features of parental burnout and...
Article
Introduction: The exploration of cognitive impairments associated with tobacco use disorder has expanded during the last decades, centrally showing working memory and executive deficits among smokers. Despite their critical role in everyday life and in the smoking cessation process, attentional abilities have seldom been explored. Previous studies...
Preprint
Full-text available
Some parents experience intense emotional exhaustion, emotional distance from their children, and feel fed up with parenting; a clinical phenomenon termed parental burnout. This latter arises when parents chronically endure severe stress without sufficient resources to cope, which may lead to detrimental consequences not only for the parent, but al...
Chapter
Full-text available
For decades, science has attempted to understand the world by boiling concepts down to their simplest components in a quest for reductionism; but, there is now a move to map the world's complexities via a network perspective. Clinical psychology has embraced this perspective as well, and researchers have started to conceptualize mental disorders as...
Preprint
Full-text available
The notion of climate anxiety has gained traction in the last years. Yet uncertainty remains regarding the variations of climate anxiety across demographic characteristics (e.g., gender, age) and its associations with adaptative (i.e., pro-environmental) behaviors. Moreover, the point-estimate proportion of people frequently experiencing climate an...
Article
Full-text available
The notion of climate change anxiety has gained traction in the last years. Clayton & Karazsia (2020) recently developed the 22-item Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CAS), which assesses climate change anxiety via a four-factor structure. Yet other research has cast doubts on the very structure of the CAS by calling either for a shorter (i.e. 13 items...
Preprint
Full-text available
The notion of climate change anxiety has gained traction in the last years. Clayton & Karazsia (2020) recently developed the 22-item Climate Change Anxiety Scale (CAS), which assesses climate change anxiety via a four-factor structure. Yet other research has cast doubts on the very structure of the CAS by calling either for a shorter (i.e. 13 items...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Major Depression Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) often co-occur, but the neurocognitive mechanisms of this co-occurrence remain unknown. Prominent views have pointed to attentional processes as potent mechanisms at play in MDD and GAD, respectively. Yet uncertainty remains regarding the very nature of attentional...
Article
Full-text available
Recent conceptualizations of interoception suggest several facets to this construct, including "interoceptive sensibility” and “self-report interoceptive scales", both of which are assessed with questionnaires. Although these conceptual efforts have helped move the field forward, uncertainty remains regarding whether current measures converge on th...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Depression is associated with reduced executive functioning. Still, we lack a more detailed understanding of the causes, nature, and mechanisms explaining this association. Addressing limitations in the previous literature, for example the “task impurity”-problem and depression heterogeneity, we examine whether poor executive functionin...
Article
Full-text available
Background. Major Depression Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) often co-occur, but uncertainty remains regarding the neurocognitive mechanisms linked to this co-occurrence. In this study, we applied network analytic methods to characterize the associations of the attention control (AC) components, as assessed using laboratory-ba...
Article
Cohort studies have displayed mixed findings on changes in mental symptoms severity in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak started. Network approaches can provide additional insights by analyzing the connectivity of such symptoms. We assessed the network structure of mental symptoms in the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Health (ELSA-Brasil)...
Article
Full-text available
Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and disabling but seem particularly tractable to investigation with translational neuroscience methodologies. Neuroimaging has informed our understanding of the neurobiology of anxiety disorders, but research has been limited by small sample sizes and low statistical power, as well as heterogenous imaging meth...
Article
Full-text available
Since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has profoundly impacted public health and the economy worldwide. But there are not the only ones to be hit. The COVID-19 pandemic has also substantially altered mental health, with anxiety symptoms being one of the most frequently reported problems. E...
Article
Full-text available
Background There is a paucity of research that has examined the dynamic relationship between maladaptive social-evaluative beliefs and social anxiety. Thus, this study aimed to use latent change score models to examine changes in three theory-driven maladaptive social-evaluative belief types (i.e., conditional, unconditional, and high standard beli...
Preprint
Full-text available
Introduction. Major Depression Disorder (MDD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) often co-occur, but the neurocognitive mechanisms of this co-occurrence remain unknown. Prominent views have pointed to attentional processes as potent mechanisms at play in MDD and GAD, respectively. Yet uncertainty remains regarding the very nature of attentional...
Preprint
Full-text available
Network analyses have become increasingly common within the field of psychology, and temporal network analyses, in particular, are quickly gaining traction, with many of the initial articles earning substantial interest. However, substantial heterogeneity exists within the study designs and methodology, rendering it difficult to form a comprehensiv...
Preprint
Full-text available
Parental burnout results from chronic stress in parenting, and it can be accompanied by harmful behaviors such as parental neglect and violence. Network analysis examines psychological phenomena within a system of its constituents, and thus it is promising for understanding the distinct features of parental burnout and behaviors related to it. Rece...
Article
Full-text available
Despite the large-scale dissemination of mindfulness-based interventions, debates persist about the very nature of mindfulness. To date, one of the dominant views is the five-facet approach, which suggests that mindfulness includes five facets (i.e., Observing, Describing, Nonjudging, Nonreactivity, and Acting with Awareness). However, uncertainty...
Article
Full-text available
Aims Negative and Positive urgency are emotion-related impulsivity traits that are thought to be transdiagnostic factors in psychopathology. However, it has recently been claimed that these two traits are closely related to each other and that considering them separately might have limited conceptual and methodological value. The present study aime...
Preprint
The main objective of this report is to test the hypothesis that the adoption of an active information-seeking practice related to the health crisis on social networks can be understood as a risk practice in the Covid-19 infodemic. A second objective is to identify the existence of different vulnerability profiles in the infodemic and to understand...
Research
Full-text available
The main objective of this report is to test the hypothesis that the adoption of an active information-seeking practice related to the health crisis on social networks can be understood as a risk practice in the Covid-19 infodemic. A second objective is to identify the existence of different vulnerability profiles in the infodemic and to understand...
Preprint
Full-text available
Despite the large-scale dissemination of mindfulness-based interventions, debates persist about the very nature of mindfulness. To date, one of the dominant views is the five-facet approach, which suggests that mindfulness includes five facets (i.e., Observing, Describing, Nonjudging, Nonreactivity, and Acting with Awareness). However, uncertainty...
Preprint
Full-text available
Parental burnout is a growing subject of research, but thus far this research has not examined whether the features of parental burnout fluctuate over time. Moreover, parenting and parental burnout are inextricable from their family context. Therefore, a critical next step involves examining how parental burnout features temporally unfold and inter...
Preprint
Full-text available
Since the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic on March 11, 2020, the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has profoundly impacted public health and the economy worldwide. But there are not the only ones to be hit. The COVID-19 pandemic has also substantially altered mental health, with anxiety symptoms being one of the most frequently reported problems. E...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction. Broadly considered a transdiagnostic feature of psychological disorders, rumination is associated with lower treatment response, slower recovery rates, and higher relapse rates. Accordingly, research has focused on the development of interventions to alleviate rumination. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has em...
Preprint
Full-text available
Recent conceptualizations of interoception suggest several facets to this construct, including "interoceptive sensibility” and “self-report interoceptive scales", both of which are assessed with questionnaires. Although these conceptual efforts have helped move the field forward, uncertainty remains regarding whether current measures converge on th...
Article
This study aimed to delineate the specific characteristics of binge drinking habits by capitalizing on data-driven network analysis. Such an approach allowed us to consider binge drinking as a network system of interacting elements, thus identifying the key variables involved in this phenomenon. A total of 1,455 university students with excessive d...
Article
Full-text available
Background: The use of network analyses in psychology has increasingly gained traction in the last few years. A network perspective views psychological constructs as dynamic systems of interacting elements. Objective: We present the first study to apply network analyses to examine how the hallmark features of parental burnout — i.e., exhaustion re...
Preprint
Full-text available
Broadly considered a transdiagnostic feature of psychological disorders, rumination is associated with lower treatment response, slower recovery rates, and higher relapse rates. Accordingly, research has focused on the development of interventions to alleviate rumination. Recently, transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a pro...
Preprint
Full-text available
Network science has allowed varied scientific fields to investigate and visualize complex relations between many variables, and psychology research has begun to adopt a network perspective. In this paper, we consider how leaving behind reductionist approaches and instead embracing a network perspective can advance the field of parental burnout. Alt...
Article
Full-text available
Network science has allowed varied scientific fields to investigate and visualize complex relations between many variables, and psychology research has begun to adopt a network perspective. In this paper, we consider how leaving behind reductionist approaches and instead embracing a network perspective can advance the field of parental burnout. Alt...
Article
Full-text available
Mobile phone use and misuse have become a pressing challenge in today's society. Dangerous mobile phone use, such as the use of a mobile phone while driving, is widely practiced, though banned in several jurisdictions. Research aiming at unfolding the psychological predictors of dangerous mobile phone use have so far been scarce. Especially, resear...
Article
Full-text available
La question de la comorbidité (i.e., la présence conjointe de plusieurs troubles) n’est que très peu documentée dans la littérature scientifique actuelle. Pourtant, au vu des données épidémiologiques alarmantes et du coût sociétal qu’elle représente, elle est au cœur des enjeux tant cliniques que sociétaux. La comorbidité constitue un défi de taill...
Article
Full-text available
Paranoid beliefs have been conceptualized as a central psychological process linked to schizophrenia and many mental disorders. Research on paranoia has indicated that it is pivotal to consider not only levels but also dynamic aspects of incriminated related mechanisms over time. In the present study, we conceptualized paranoia as a system of inter...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Attention is a multifaceted construct, including three distinct attentional networks: the alerting, orienting, and executive conflict networks. Recently, researchers have started to envision strategies to enhance the attentional networks, and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a promising tool to do so, especi...
Preprint
Full-text available
Paranoid beliefs have been conceptualized as a central psychological process linked to schizophrenia and many mental disorders. Research on paranoia has indicated that it is pivotal to consider not only levels but also dynamics aspects of incriminated related-mechanisms over time. In the present study, we conceptualized paranoia as a system of inte...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: The use of network analyses in psychology has increasingly gained traction in the last few years. A network perspective views psychological constructs as dynamic systems of interacting elements. Objective: We present the first study to apply network analyses to examine how the hallmark features of parental burnout — i.e., exhaustion re...
Preprint
Attention is a multifaceted construct, including three distinct attentional networks: the alerting, orienting, and executive conflict networks. Recently, researchers have started to envision strategies to enhance the attentional networks, and transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has emerged as a promising tool to do so, especially regardi...
Preprint
Full-text available
La question de la comorbidité (i.e., la présence conjointe de plusieurs troubles) n’est que très peu documentée dans la littérature scientifique actuelle. Pourtant, au vu des données épidémiologiques alarmantes et du coût sociétal qu’elle représente, elle est au cœur des enjeux tant cliniques que sociétaux. La comorbidité constitue un défi de taill...