Anita Schick

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Verified

Anita verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• PostDoc Position at Central Institute of Mental Health

Purpose Sustainable diets are vital to tackle climate change and promote health. They may also offer significant benefits for mental and physical wellbeing. Creating a sustainable food environment at the working place could therefore contribute to the wellbeing of employees. In this quasi-experiment, we investigated effects of providing vegan menus...

BACKGROUND Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) offer a promising strategy for targeting putative mechanisms of mental health problems by delivering real-time, tailored intervention components that adapt to person, moment, and context based on data collected using ecological momentary assessment (EMA). However, most research to date focuses on...

BACKGROUND Although the integration of self-monitored patient data into mental health care offers potential for advancing personalised approaches, its application in clinical practice remains largely underexplored. Capturing individuals' mental health outside the therapy room using Experience Sampling Methods (ESM) may bridge this gap by supporting...

This study investigates the associations between early childhood adversities, stress perception, and fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS). Although the interconnection between dysregulated stress systems and FMS is well documented, the interconnection between early adversities and FMS remains less understood. This study explores the relationship of early-li...

Objectives Previous research indicates that the hybrid compassion‐focused intervention EMIcompass may reduce stress reactivity and improve quality of life. Our aim was to investigate what components of the intervention work for whom, how, and under which circumstances to contribute to the enhancement of resilience. Methods We conducted a process e...

Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is a chronic disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and tenderness and closely associated with high levels of stress. FMS is therefore often considered a stress-related disease. A comparative study was conducted with 99 individuals diagnosed with FMS and a control group of 50 pain-free individ...

Importance The field of public mental health is evolving to tackle the profound impact of global challenges such as climate change, migration, and health crises. These issues accentuate health and social inequities, necessitating a focus on how to achieve interventions that are equitable and enhance mental health across all societal strata. Observ...

Background: Recent advances in digital mental health have paved the way for more personalized mobile health (mHealth) interventions by leveraging intensive longitudinal ecological momentary assessment (EMA) data. Ecological Momentary Interventions (EMIs) facilitate reach of individuals in a given moment and context, in their daily living environmen...

This position paper by the international IMMERSE consortium reviews the evidence of a digital mental health solution based on Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) for advancing person-centered mental health care and outlines a research agenda for implementing innovative digital mental health tools into routine clinical practice. ESM is a structure...

Background Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of digital tools for delivering person-centred mental health care. Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), a structured diary technique for capturing moment-to-moment variation in experience and behaviour in service users’ daily life, reflects a particularly promising avenue for impleme...

Stress resilience is the maintenance of mental health despite adversity. We have predicted that a tendency to appraise stressors in a realistic to slightly unrealistically positive fashion (positive appraisal style, PAS) is prospectively associated with more resilient outcomes; that PAS is a proximal and integrative resilience factor, mediating the...

Background Given the rapid expansion of research into digital health interventions (DHIs) for severe mental illness (SMI; eg, schizophrenia and other psychosis diagnoses), there is an emergent need for clear safety measures. Currently, measurement and reporting of adverse events (AEs) are inconsistent across studies. Therefore, an international net...

Background Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of digital tools for delivering person-centred mental health care. Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), a structured diary technique for capturing moment-to-moment variation in experience and behaviour in service users’ daily life, reflects a particularly promising avenue for impleme...

Background Digital health interventions (DHIs) have significant potential to upscale treatment access to people experiencing psychosis but raise questions around patient safety. Adverse event (AE) monitoring is used to identify, record, and manage safety issues in clinical trials, but little is known about the specific content and context contained...

Appraisal refers to the evaluation of stimuli or situations with respect to an individual’s goals and needs. Stimuli or situations that are appraised as a threat to one’ goals and needs (‘stressors’) induce stress responses (‘stress’). Stressor appraisal occurs on various dimensions, of which the magnitude or cost of a potential adverse outcome, th...

Introduction: Fibromyalgia syndrome (FMS) is a chronic disorder characterized by widespread musculoskeletal pain, fatigue and tenderness and closely associated with high levels of stress. FMS is therefore often considered a stress-related disease. Methods: A comparative study was conducted with 99 individuals diagnosed with FMS and a control group...

Background and Hypotheses Affective recovery, operationalized as the time needed for affect to return to baseline levels after daily stressors, may be a putative momentary representation of resilience. This study aimed to investigate affective recovery in positive and negative affect across subclinical and clinical stages of psychosis and whether t...

Positive Appraisal Style Theory of Resilience posits that a person’s general style of evaluating stressors plays a central role in mental health and resilience. Specifically, a tendency to appraise stressors positively (positive appraisal style; PAS) is theorized to be protective of mental health and thus a key resilience factor. To this date no me...

Importance Targeting low self-esteem in youth exposed to childhood adversity is a promising strategy for preventing adult mental disorders. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) allow for the delivery of youth-friendly, adaptive interventions for improving self-esteem, but robust trial-based evidence is pending. Objective To examine the effica...

Background Chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMSP) affects between 13% and 47% of the population, with a global growth rate of 20.3% within the last 15 years, suggesting that there is a high need for effective treatments. Pain diaries have long been a common tool in nonpharmacological pain treatment for monitoring and providing feedback on patients’ sy...

Zusammenfassung Dieser Artikel hat zum Ziel, einen Überblick über drei zentrale Strategien populationsbasierter Interventionen der Public Mental Health darzustellen: (1) Hochrisikostrategie, (2) Populationsstrategie und der (3) vulnerable Populationsansatz. Dabei werden zentrale Herausforderungen beleuchtet und die Bedeutung inter- und transdiszipl...

Compassion-focused interventions represent a promising transdiagnostic approach, but the mechanisms involved in hybrid delivery combining face-to-face sessions and an ecological momentary intervention remain unexplored. The current study aimed at exploring associations of putative mechanisms with clinical outcomes at post-intervention/follow-up and...

When modeling longitudinal biomedical data, often dimensionality reduction as well as dynamic modeling in the resulting latent representation is needed. This can be achieved by artificial neural networks for dimension reduction and differential equations for dynamic modeling of individual-level trajectories. However, such approaches so far assume t...

Zusammenfassung In den letzten Jahren haben sich die Anstrengungen im Bereich der Public Mental Health intensiviert, die psychische Gesundheit und Gesundheitskompetenz auf Bevölkerungsebene zu stärken sowie Fortschritte in der Prävention und Versorgung von psychischen Erkrankungen zu erzielen. Der vorliegende Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über derze...

Positive Appraisal Style Theory of Resilience posits that a person’s general style of evaluating stressors plays a central role in mental health and resilience. Specifically, a tendency to appraise stressors positively (positive appraisal style; PAS) is theorized to be protective of mental health and thus a key resilience factor. To this date no me...

Background/hypothesis: Digital interventions targeting transdiagnostic mechanisms in daily life may be a promising translational strategy for prevention and early intervention of psychotic and other severe mental disorders. We aimed to investigate the feasibility and initial signals of efficacy of a transdiagnostic, compassion-focused, hybrid ecol...

Background The therapy of chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMSP) is complex and the treatment results are often insufficient despite numerous therapeutic options. While individual patients respond very well to specific interventions, other patients show no improvement. Personalized treatment assignment offers a promising approach to improve response r...

Background Novel approaches in mobile mental health (mHealth) apps that make use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Ecological Momentary Assessments, and Ecological Momentary Interventions have the potential to support young people in the achievement of mental health and wellbeing goals. However, little is known on the perspectives of young people an...

Recent technological advances enable the collection of intensive longitudinal data. This scoping review aimed to provide an overview of methods for collecting intensive time series data in mental health research as well as basic principles, current applications, target constructs, and statistical methods for this type of data. In January 2021, the...

Background Young people are a target population for mental health–related early intervention and prevention. Although evidence for early intervention is promising, availability of and access to youth mental health services remain limited. Therefore, the development of an evidence-based hybrid intervention is urgently needed. Objective This study a...

Background Mental disorders in adolescence and young adulthood are major public health concerns. Digital tools such as text-based conversational agents (ie, chatbots) are a promising technology for facilitating mental health assessment. However, the human-like interaction style of chatbots may induce potential biases, such as socially desirable res...

BACKGROUND Chronic musculoskeletal pain (CMSP) affects between 13% and 47% of the population, with a global growth rate of 20.3% within the last 15 years, suggesting that there is a high need for effective treatments. Pain diaries have long been a common tool in nonpharmacological pain treatment for monitoring and providing feedback on patients’ sy...

Childhood adversity is associated with psychopathology. First evidence in adults suggests that threat anticipation, i.e., an enhanced anticipation of unpleasant events creating an enduring sense of threat, may be a putative mechanism linking childhood adversity to psychopathology. This study aimed to test the indirect effect of childhood adversity...

Deep learning approaches can uncover complex patterns in data. In particular, variational autoencoders achieve this by a non-linear mapping of data into a low-dimensional latent space. Motivated by an application to psychological resilience in the Mainz Resilience Project, which features intermittent longitudinal measurements of stressors and menta...

BACKGROUND Identifying momentary risk and protective mechanisms may enhance our understanding and treatment of mental disorders. Affective stress reactivity is one mechanism that has been reported to be altered in individuals with early and later stages of mental disorder. Additionally, initial evidence suggests individuals with early and enduring...

Background Identifying momentary risk and protective mechanisms may enhance our understanding and treatment of mental disorders. Affective stress reactivity is one mechanism that has been reported to be altered in individuals with early and later stages of mental disorder. Additionally, initial evidence suggests individuals with early and enduring...

When modeling longitudinal biomedical data, often dimensionality reduction as well as dynamic modeling in the resulting latent representation is needed. This can be achieved by artificial neural networks for dimension reduction, and differential equations for dynamic modeling of individual-level trajectories. However, such approaches so far assume...

Background There is evidence for a polygenic contribution to psychosis. One targetable mechanism through which polygenic variation may impact on individuals and interact with the social environment is stress sensitization, characterized by elevated reactivity to minor stressors in daily life. The current study aimed to investigate whether stress re...

Background Most mental disorders first emerge in youth and, in their early stages, surface as subthreshold expressions of symptoms comprising a transdiagnostic phenotype of psychosis, mania, depression, and anxiety. Elevated stress reactivity is one of the most widely studied mechanisms underlying psychotic and affective mental health problems. Thu...

Background Negative symptoms occur in individuals at ultrahigh risk (UHR) for psychosis. Although there is evidence that observer ratings of negative symptoms are associated with level of functioning, the predictive value of subjective experience in daily life for individuals at UHR has not been studied yet. Objective This study therefore aims to...

Background Youth are particularly affected by mental health problems, but their use of preventive interventions remains limited. The advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) enable the development of digital interventions for mental health promotion and prevention. This applies to ecological momentary interventions (EMI), which offer adaptive train...

Resilience is the maintenance and/or quick recovery of mental health during and after periods of adversity. It is conceptualized to result from a dynamic process of successful adaptation to stressors. Up to now, a large number of resilience factors have been proposed, but the mechanisms underlying resilience are not yet understood. To shed light on...

Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. How to operationalize resilience and to determine the factors and processes that lead to good long-term mental health outcomes in stressor-exposed individuals is a matter of ongoing debate and of critical importance for the advance...

Background: Digital interventions offer new avenues for low-threshold prevention and treatment in young people. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) represent a powerful approach that allows for adaptive, real-time, and real-world delivery of intervention components in daily life by real-time processing of ecological momentary assessment (EMA)...

Aims Childhood trauma is associated with an elevated risk for psychosis, but the psychological mechanisms involved remain largely unclear. This study aimed to investigate emotional and psychotic stress reactivity in daily life as a putative mechanism linking childhood trauma and clinical outcomes in individuals at ultra-high-risk (UHR) for psychosi...

BACKGROUND Negative symptoms occur in individuals at ultrahigh risk (UHR) for psychosis. Although there is evidence that observer ratings of negative symptoms are associated with level of functioning, the predictive value of subjective experience in daily life for individuals at UHR has not been studied yet. OBJECTIVE This study therefore aims to...

Background: Ward-equivalent treatment (StäB), a form of crisis resolution and home treatment in Germany, has been introduced in 2018 as a new model of mental health service delivery for people with an indication for inpatient care. The rapid progress in the field of information and communication technology offers entirely new opportunities for inn...

Background: Accumulating evidence suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has negative effects on public mental health. Digital interventions that have been developed and evaluated in recent years may be used to mitigate the negative consequences of the pandemic. However, evidence-based recommendations on the use of existing telemedicine and internet-based...

Background: Public health measures to curb SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates may have negative psychosocial consequences in youth. Digital interventions may help to mitigate these effects. We investigated the associations between social isolation, COVID-19-related cognitive preoccupation, worries, and anxiety, objective social risk indicators, and psyc...

Background One putative psychological mechanism through which momentary stress impacts on psychosis in individuals with increased liability to the disorder is via affective disturbance. However, to date, this has not been systematically tested. We aimed to investigate whether (i) cross-sectional and temporal effects of momentary stress on psychotic...

BACKGROUND Most mental disorders first emerge in youth and, in their early stages, surface as subthreshold expressions of symptoms comprising a transdiagnostic phenotype of psychosis, mania, depression, and anxiety. Elevated stress reactivity is one of the most widely studied mechanisms underlying psychotic and affective mental health problems. Thu...

Background: Digital interventions offer new avenues for low-threshold prevention and treatment in youth. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) represent a powerful approach that allows for adaptive, real-time, and real-world delivery of intervention components in daily life by real-time processing of Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) data....

BACKGROUND Digital interventions offer new avenues for low-threshold prevention and treatment in young people. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) represent a powerful approach that allows for adaptive, real-time, and real-world delivery of intervention components in daily life by real-time processing of ecological momentary assessment (EMA)...

Background: Most mental disorders first emerge in youth and, in their early stages, surface as subthreshold expressions of symptoms comprising a transdiagnostic phenotype. Elevated stress reactivity is one of the most widely studied psychological mechanisms underlying psychotic and affective mental health problems. Thus, targeting stress reactivity...

Die stationsäquivalente psychiatrische Behandlung (StäB) wurde 2018 als neue Krankenhausleistung für Menschen eingeführt, die die Indikation für eine stationäre Behandlung erfüllen. Die rasanten Fortschritte im Bereich der Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologie bieten völlig neue Chancen für innovative digitale Versorgungsangebote wie telemedi...

Digital interventions offer new avenues for prevention and treatment in youth. Ecological momentary interventions (EMIs) allow for adaptive and real-time delivery of intervention components in daily life. Compassion-focused interventions may be particularly amenable to translation into an EMI to strengthen emotional resilience in youth. We aimed to...

Deep learning approaches can uncover complex patterns in data. In particular, variational autoencoders (VAEs) achieve this by a non-linear mapping of data into a low-dimensional latent space. Motivated by an application to psychological resilience in the Mainz Resilience Project (MARP), which features intermittent longitudinal measurements of stres...

BACKGROUND Accumulating evidence suggests the COVID-19 pandemic has negative effects on public mental health. Digital interventions that have been developed and evaluated in recent years may be used to mitigate the negative consequences of the pandemic. However, evidence-based recommendations on the use of existing telemedicine and internet-based (...

Childhood trauma is associated with an elevated risk for psychosis, but the psychological mechanisms involved remain largely unclear. This study aimed to investigate emotional and psychotic stress reactivity in daily life as a putative mechanism linking childhood trauma and clinical outcomes in individuals at ultra-high risk (UHR) for psychosis. Ex...

Background: Digital interventions may be used to mitigate psychosocial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic but evidence-based recommendations are lacking. The aim of this rapid meta-review was to investigate the theoretical base, user perspective, safety, effectiveness, and cost effectiveness of digital interventions in public mental health provi...

Background: Public health measures to curb SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates may have negative psychosocial consequences in youth. Digital interventions may help to mitigate these effects. We investigated the associations between social isolation, cognitive preoccupation, worries, and anxiety, objective social risk indicators, psychological distress as...

Resilience has been defined as the maintenance or quick recovery of mental health during and after times of adversity. Such good longer-term mental health outcomes despite adversity presumably result from complex and dynamic processes of adaptation to stressor exposure (‘resilience processes’), which in many cases include changes in individual prop...

Highly arousing, affective stimuli have adverse effects on cognition and performance. Perception of affective stimuli is, however, highly subjective and may impact on the interaction of emotion and cognition. Here, we tested the impact of high- versus low-threatening stimuli on response inhibition as a function of perceived threat intensity. Respon...

Motivated by the recent replicability crisis we tested replicability of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) group activations in two independent samples. An identical behavioral and fMRI test battery for the longitudinal investigation of stress resilience mechanisms was developed for the Mainz Resilience Project (MARP) and conducted in a d...

Resilience is the maintenance or rapid recovery of mental health during and after stressor exposure. It is becoming increasingly clear that resilience results from a complex and dynamic process of adaptation to stressors involving the biological, psychological and social levels. Positive appraisal style theory of resilience (PASTOR) claims that the...

Background: According to current research concepts resilience can be defined as adaptation to past and ongoing exposure. Accordingly, adaptation to exposure is a dynamic process, which can be different in different population groups. Prospective longitudinal studies provide unique opportunities to investigate resilience processes. Objectives: Th...

p>Consistent failure over the past few decades to reduce the high prevalence of stress-related disorders has motivated a search for alternative research strategies. Resilience refers to the phenomenon of many people maintaining mental health despite exposure to psychological or physical adversity. Instead of aiming to understand the pathophysiology...

Affective state can influence cognition leading to biased information processing, interpretation, attention, and memory. Such bias has been reported to be essential for the onset and maintenance of different psychopathologies, particularly affective disorders. However, empirical evidence has been very heterogeneous and little is known about the neu...

Investigations of cognitive biases in animals are conceptually and translationally valuable because they contribute to animal welfare research and help to extend and refine our understanding of human emotional disorders, where biased information processing is a critical causal and maintenance factor. We employed the "learned helplessness" genetic r...