Fabien D'Hondt

Université de Lille · Faculty of Medicine

Background: Substance use disorders (SUDs) are associated with impairments of cognitive functions, and cognitive training programs are thus rapidly developing in SUD treatment. However, neuropsychological impairments observed early after withdrawal (i.e., early impairments), that is, approximately in the first six months, may be widespread. Consequ...

Eye tracking has emerged as a reliable neuroscience tool indexing the eye movements’ correlates of impairments resulting from alcohol-use disorders, ranging from perceptive abilities to high-level cognitive functions. This systematic review, following PRISMA guidelines, encompasses all human studies using eye tracking in participants presenting acu...

Previous reports suggest that adverse events during childhood could be related to an array of psychiatric problems. Here, we question the relationship between childhood traumatic experiences and the sensory complexity of hallucinations in a cohort of 75 children and adolescents. We evidence a positive link between the number of sensory modalities i...

Importance The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and quarantine measures have raised concerns regarding their psychological effects on populations. Among the general population, university students appear to be particularly susceptible to experiencing mental health problems. Objectives To measure the prevalence of self-reported mental h...

This study aimed to investigate the time course of attentional bias for negative information in healthy individuals and to assess the associated influence of trait anxiety. Thirty-eight healthy volunteers performed an emotional dot-probe task with pairs of negative and neutral scenes, presented for either 1 or 2 s and followed by a target placed at...

Many patients with substance use disorders (SUDs) present cognitive deficits, which are associated with clinical outcomes. Neuropsychological remediation might help rehabilitate cognitive functions in these populations, hence improving treatment effectiveness. Nardo and colleagues (2022) reviewed 32 studies applying cognitive remediation for patien...

BACKGROUND The COVID-19 pandemic has not been associated with increases in suicidal behaviour at the national, regional, or county level. However, previous studies were not conducted on a finer scale or adjusted for ecological factors. Our objective was to assess the fine-scale spatiotemporal association between self-harm and COVID-19 hospitalizati...

Background: Research on biased processing of aversive stimuli in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has produced inconsistent results between response time (RT) and eye-tracking studies. Recent RT-based results of dot-probe studies showed no attentional bias (AB) for threat while eye-tracking research suggested heightened sustained attention for...

A body of research indicates that people are prone to overestimate the affective impact of future events. Here, we developed a novel experimental paradigm to study these affective forecasting biases under laboratory conditions using subjective (arousal and valence) and autonomic measures (skin conductance responses, SCRs, and heart rate). Thirty pa...

Introduction: Basic epidemiological data are rare concerning the activity of specialized forensic psychiatric facilities in France. Here, we investigated the activity of the ten (640 beds) French "units for difficult patients" (unités pour malades difficiles [UMDs]). Method: We used the Programme de médicalisation des systèmes d'information (PMS...

Les usagers des services de psychiatrie constituent une population particulièrement à risque de violences sexuelles. Si ces violences surviennent majoritairement en dehors des lieux de soins, elles peuvent parfois se produire au cours d’une hospitalisation en psychiatrie. Dans cet entretien avec Jean-Pierre Bouchard, Bettina Belet, Estelle Demeulem...

Objective: Evidence shows that many patients with COVID-19 present persistent symptoms after the acute infection. Some patients may be at a high risk of developing Somatic Symptom Disorder (SSD), in which persistent symptoms are accompanied by excessive and disproportionate health-related thoughts, feelings and behaviors regarding these symptoms....

Importance: The Conséquences de la pandémie de COVID-19 sur la santé mentale des étudiants (COSAMe) survey was conducted among university students in France during the COVID-19 pandemic and found that although there was a slight decrease in anxiety, depression, and stress between the first lockdown (T1) and 1 month after it ended (T2), the prevale...

Pediatric social anxiety is characterized by attentional biases (AB) towards social threats. This study used a new response-based calculation method to assess AB from response times (RT) in a visual dot-probe task and electroencephalography (EEG) to explore its electrophysiological correlates. Twenty, high socially anxious children (HSA) (mean [M ]...

Introduction The rates of alcohol and illegal drug use and the prevalence of alcohol and illegal drug use disorders (AUD and DUD) are high in prison populations, particularly in men entering jail. However, these rates have never been exhaustively assessed and compared to those of the general population in France. Methods We based our research on t...

Rationale Visuo-perceptive deficits in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) remain little understood, notably regarding the respective involvement of the two main human visual streams, i.e., magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways, in these deficits. Besides, in healthy populations, low-level visual perception can adapt depending on the na...

Purpose We sought to measure the prevalence of psychotic symptoms (PSs) and psychotic disorders (PDs) in a sample of men entering jail and to compare these prevalences with those observed in the general population. We also aimed to explore the sociodemographic and clinical factors associated with PSs and PDs. Methods The Mental Health in the Priso...

Existing multimodal stress/pain recognition approaches generally extract features from different modalities independently and thus ignore cross-modality correlations. This paper proposes a novel geometric framework for multimodal stress/pain detection utilizing Symmetric Positive Definite (SPD) matrices as a representation that incorporates the cor...

Despite the increasing computerization of hospital information systems, segments of patient care are still in paper format. Data extracted automatically from the hospital databases for one specific project are thus supplemented by data collected manually. Data collection tools are usually developed entirely, which requires computer knowledge and is...

Introduction The COVID-19 related quarantine had negative psychological effects among University students. Evidence from previous epidemics suggests that negative psychological effects of quarantine measures can last or even worsen after the quarantine lift. The objective of this study was to assess the evolution of students' mental health and to i...

Background Criminal responsibility is a key concept in the criminal sanctioning of people diagnosed with mental health disorders who have committed crimes. In France, based on the recommendations of one or more expert psychiatrists, a judge can declare a person not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder (NCRMD) if, at the time of the...

Background Despite the poor mental health status of people who are incarcerated, few studies have examined the number of psychiatric hospitalisations in this population. Since 2010, France has progressively opened nine full-time inpatient psychiatric wards exclusively for people who are incarcerated, called “specially adapted hospital units” (unité...

Visuospatial impairments have long been reported in Severe Alcohol Use Disorder but remain poorly understood, notably regarding the involvement of magnocellular (MC) and parvocellular (PC) pathways. This empirical gap hampers understanding the implications of these visual changes, especially since the MC and PC pathways are thought to sustain centr...

Background Cognitive models indicated that social anxiety disorder (SAD) would be caused and maintained by a biased attentional processing of threatening information. This study investigates whether socially anxious children may present impaired attentional engagement and disengagement from negative emotional faces, as well as their underlying even...

(238 words) Research has consistently shown high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in correctional settings. We aimed to compare the prevalence rates of trauma exposure, subthreshold PTSD, and full PTSD in incarcerated people with those observed in the general population. We used the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview to sc...

This study investigates how asymmetry, expressed emotion, and sex of the expresser impact the perception of emotional facial expressions (EFEs) in terms of perceived genuineness. Thirty-five undergraduate women completed a task using chimeric stimuli with artificial human faces. They were required to judge whether the expressed emotion was genuinel...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has raised concerns regarding its psychological effect on university students, especially healthcare students. We aimed at assessing the risk of mental health problems according to the type of university studies, by adjusting for potential confounders. Methods We used data from the COSAMe study, a national cross-sec...

The present literature review aimed at offering a comprehensive and critical view of the behavioral data collected during the past seventy years concerning visuoperception in severe alcohol use disorders (SAUD). To pave the way for a renewal of research and clinical approaches in this very little understood field, this paper: (1) provides a critica...

Many studies have reported negative outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic on people's mental health. Notably, high prevalence rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms have been described in healthcare workers (26.9% [20.3%-33.,6%]), individuals with COVID-19 (23.8% [16.6%-31.0%]) and in the general population (19.3% [15.3%-23.2%]) (1).

The COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine measures have sparked debate regarding their traumatic nature. This cross-sectional study reports the prevalence rate of probable post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) and associated factors among French university students. A total of 22,883 students completed the online questionnaire. The prevalence rate of pr...

Background: Dominant theoretical models consider that attentional biases (AB) towards alcohol-related stimuli play a key role in the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorder (AUD). Their assessment has however showed high inconsistencies and has been mostly based on unreliable behavioral measures. This study evaluated the presence and ex...

Acute alcohol intoxication and alcohol use disorders are characterized by a wide range of psychological and cerebral impairments, which have been widely explored using neuropsychological and neuroscientific techniques. Eye tracking has recently emerged as an innovative tool to renew this exploration, as eye movements offer complementary information...

Background: Severe Alcohol Use Disorder (SAUD) is associated with widespread cognitive impairments, including low-level visual processing deficits persisting even after prolonged abstinence. However, the extent and characteristics of these visual deficits remain largely undetermined, impeding the identification of their underlying mechanisms and i...

Background: Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is associated with social cognition deficits. Patients with SAUD are impaired for the recognition of emotional facial expressions, particularly at early stages of abstinence. These deficits damage interpersonal relations and increase relapse risk. However, uncertainties still abound on their variation...

Visuoperceptive deficits are frequently reported in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) and are considered as pervasive and persistent in time. While this topic of investigation has previously driven researchers’ interest, far fewer studies have focused on visuoperception since the ‘90s, leaving open central questions regarding the origin and implic...

Rationale: Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is a psychiatric condition linked to cerebral and cognitive consequences. SAUD is notably characterized by an over-activation of the reflexive/reward system when confronted with alcohol-related cues. Such over-reactivity generates a preferential allocation of attentional resources towards these cues, la...

While severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is classically characterized as a compulsion to seek and consume alcohol and a reduced ability to control these behaviors, a growing number of studies shows social cognition difficulties among recently detoxified patients. The present chapter proposes an overview of this literature by presenting the main fin...

Objective: To assess the prevalence of and risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in patients with COVID-19. Methods: We conducted a cohort study between March and May 2020 at the Lille University Hospital (France), including all patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19. Psychological distress symptoms were measured 3 weeks aft...

Résumé Le trouble de stress post-traumatique (TSPT) est l’un des troubles psychiatriques les plus fréquents en milieu pénitentiaire, puisque sa prévalence « vie entière » atteint 17,8 % chez les hommes et 40,1 % chez les femmes en détention. Pourtant, le TSPT reste sous-diagnostiqué et peu étudié dans cette population. Cette revue de la littérature...

Background Depersonalization is a complex phenomenological experience initially described as a psychological disturbance of self-awareness. Among the different dimensions underlying depersonalization, emotional numbing appears to be a key symptom but remains a poorly understood phenomenon. Method We conducted a systematic review, following PRISMA...

The widespread cognitive and cerebral consequences of prenatal alcohol exposure have been established during the last decades, through the exploration of fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD) using neuropsychological and neuroscience tools. This research field has recently benefited from the emergence of innovative measures, among which eye track...

Background: Attentional bias towards alcohol-related stimuli is a core characteristic of severe alcohol use disorders (AUD), directly linked to clinical variables (alcohol consumption, relapse). Nevertheless, the extent of this bias in subclinical populations remains poorly documented. This is particularly true for binge drinking, an alcohol consum...

Severe alcohol use disorders (SAUD) are associated with a large variety of affective disturbances, among which a well-established decoding deficit for facial and vocal emotional expressions. This deficit has recently been found to be increased in cross-modal settings, namely when inputs from different sensory modalities have to be combined. Compare...

Background: Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is associated with impaired discrimination of emotional expressions. This deficit appears increased in crossmodal settings, when simultaneous inputs from different sensory modalities are presented. However, so far, studies exploring emotional crossmodal processing in SAUD relied on static faces and unm...

Rationale. Binge drinking (i.e., excessive episodic alcohol consumption) among young adults has been associated with deleterious consequences, notably at the cognitive and brain levels. These behavioural impairments and brain alterations have a direct impact on psychological and interpersonal functioning, but they might also be involved in the tran...

Reward processing impairments have been linked with positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Here, we performed a coordinate-based meta-analysis that combined eleven BOLD-fMRI studies comparing reward anticipation signals between schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. We observed a reduced difference in activation in schizophrenia pat...

Dans ce document, nous reprenons l’ensemble des outils, étapes et ressources de base indispensables à la réalisation d’un premier travail de recherche (dans le cadre de la thèse de médecine ou du mémoire de DES par exemple). Des explications simples et claires et de nombreux liens sont fournis. Ce document est destiné à évoluer et nous serons ravis...

Attentional bias towards alcohol-related stimuli is a core characteristic of alcohol use disorders (AUD), playing a crucial role in their development and persistence. Many behavioral studies have shown an increased allocation of attentional resources towards alcohol-related stimuli in patients with AUD, but have also revealed a direct link between...

L’ensemble des troubles psychiatriques, et singulièrement les conduites addictives, sont susceptibles d’être associés à des atteintes des fonctions cognitives, préexistantes ou conséquentes aux usages. Ces atteintes, variant, selon le type de trouble addictif, dans leur nature, dans leur fréquence, et dans leur caractère plus ou moins réversible, a...

De nombreuses études rapportent l’existence de déficits cognitifs, et notamment des fonctions exécutives, dans le trouble sévère lié à l’usage d’alcool (TSUA). Ces troubles, qui concerneraient au moins 50 % des patients, ont un effet néfaste sur la prise en charge et contribuent à la rechute. Il convient donc de les dépister de manière systématique...

The dual-process model, describing addictive disorders as resulting from an imbalance between increased automatic approach behaviors towards the substance and reduced abilities to control these behaviors, constitutes a sound theoretical framework to understand alcohol-use disorders. The present study aimed at exploring this imbalance at behavioral...

Introduction La dépression psychotique (DP) est un trouble mental sévère souvent sous-diagnostiqué alors qu’il existe des facteurs de risque, caractéristiques, traitements et prises en charge spécifiques [1], [2], [3], [4]. L’objectif de cette étude est de rechercher des caractéristiques sociodémographiques et cliniques associées aux DP en comparan...

Visuoperceptive impairments are among the most frequently reported deficits in alcohol-use disorders, but only very few studies have investigated their origin and interactions with other categories of dysfunctions. Besides, these deficits have generally been interpreted in a linear bottom-up perspective, which appears very restrictive with respect...

Theoretical and experimental approaches to alcohol use disorders (AUD) have mostly focused on the exploration of cognitive factors. More recently, several studies have explored socio-emotional variables in this population, documenting massive impairments and suggesting that they could have a key role in the emergence and persistence of alcohol-rela...

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at...

Il est désormais reconnu que les processus émotionnels influencent la perception visuelle par le biais de facteurs exogènes (propres aux stimuli visuels) et endogènes (propres à l’individu) [1]. Parmi les facteurs endogènes, l’anxiété-trait, qui correspond à la propension à vivre fréquemment des états anxieux au quotidien, serait associée à un biai...

Background: Patients with severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) frequently show cognitive deficits that can be efficiently identified using screening tools such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test. These cognitive deficits, which reduce the efficacy of therapeutic interventions and may contribute to dropout and relapse, could be, however...

Emotional processing is known to be modulated by several psychopathological dimensions. In particular, anxious behavior is associated with an attentional bias toward emotional information often characterized by contradictory manifestations at neural and behavioral levels. In healthy participants, the emotional visual stimuli have been shown to capt...

This study evaluated inhibition and performance monitoring abilities through the explicit processing of alcohol cues. Twenty-two binge drinkers and 22 control participants performed a speeded Go/No-Go task using pictures of alcohol and soft cans as Go and No-Go targets. This task measures inhibitory control and performance monitoring (i.e. task adj...

OBJECTIVE: Excessive alcohol drinking, particularly among college students, is a major health concern worldwide. The implicit associations between alcohol-related concepts and affective attributes has been repeatedly postulated as a reliable predictor of these drinking behaviors. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is considered as one of the most...

Objectives: Concussions affect the processing of emotional stimuli. This study aimed to investigate how sex interacts with concussion effects on early event-related brain potentials (ERP) measures (P1, N1) of emotional facial expressions (EFE) processing in asymptomatic, multi-concussion athletes during an EFE identification task. Methods: Forty...

Objective Familiarity is a subjective sensation that contributes to person recognition. This process is described as an emotion-based memory-trace of previous meetings and could be disrupted in schizophrenia. Consequently, familiarity disorders could be involved in the impaired social interactions observed in patients with schizophrenia. Previous s...

Introduction: Decoding emotional information from faces and voices is crucial for efficient interpersonal communication. Emotional decoding deficits have been found in alcohol-dependence (ALC), particularly in crossmodal situations (with simultaneous stimulations from different modalities), but are still underexplored in Korsakoff syndrome (KS). T...

Objective: Performance monitoring, which allows efficient behavioral regulation using either internal (error processing) or external (feedback processing) cues, has not yet been explored in binge drinking despite its adaptive importance in everyday life, particularly in the regulation of alcohol consumption. Capitalizing on a theoretical model of r...

Background Alcohol-dependence is related to large-scale cognitive impairments, particularly for executive functions (EF). These deficits persist even after long-term abstinence and have a major impact on patients’ everyday life and relapse risk. Earlier studies, based on multi-determined tasks, mostly focused on inhibition and did not offer a theor...