Filip Raes

• Professor (Associate) at KU Leuven

Objectives Neurofeedback training involves real-time monitoring and self-regulation of neural activity. Neurofeedback training paradigms have been widely employed in the context of meditation. Interestingly, prior research revealed focused attention meditation to be associated with desynchronized, non-harmonic, cross-frequency relationships between...

Objectives Adolescents with chronic conditions are at an increased risk for psychopathology, which may impact their quality of life. Reviews suggest that mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are promising to support these adolescents. This pilot study investigated the effects of an MBI on emotional distress and quality of life and examined potent...

Self-criticism and rumination are critically involved in affective disorders, with network approaches highlighting self-critical processes as central to rumination. The Self-Critical Rumination Scale (SCRS) assesses self-critical rumination, a repetitive negative thinking pattern that devalues the self, and has demonstrated good psychometric proper...

Background. Depression is characterized by different forms of overgeneralization that are all assumed to play a causal role in the development and course of depression. Methods. We examined, in a community sample of over 625 individuals, whether these different forms of overgeneralization are correlated and whether they are prospective predictors o...

Cognitive models of depression posit that persistent negative self-referent thinking (PNSRT) is an important vulnerability factor for depressive symptoms. The mechanisms involved are still understudied, especially in adolescence. PNSRT has been assessed by a behavioural decision-making task, namely the emotional reversal learning task (ERLT). Withi...

Objectives: Neurofeedback training involves real-time monitoring and self-regulation of neural activity. Neurofeedback training paradigms have been widely employed in the context of meditation. Interestingly, prior research revealed focused attention meditation to be associated with desynchronized, non-harmonic, cross-frequency relationships betwee...

Exposure to nature can enhance mental well‐being, making nature‐based interventions promising for the treatment and prevention of mental health problems like depression. Given the decreased self‐focus and sense of self‐diminishment associated with awe, the present study investigated the impact of exposure to awe‐evoking nature on two key risk and m...

Impaired episodic future thinking (EFT), as reflected in reduced specificity, low levels of detail and less use of mental imagery, has been associated with depressive symptomatology. The beneficial impact of Future Event Specificity Training (FEST) on impaired EFT has recently been demonstrated, as well as on anhedonia, the core symptom of depressi...

Background Many stress-related mental health problems, like depression and anxiety, emerge during adolescence, with some recent studies suggesting numbers are increasing. One possible way to reduce adolescents' vulnerability to stress-related mental health problems is to increase their resilience by training them in recalling specific positive memo...

Background It is increasingly recognised that the study of responses to positive emotions significantly contributes to our understanding of psychopathology. Notably, positive emotions are not necessarily experienced as pleasurable. Instead, some believe that experiencing happiness may have negative consequences, referred to as fear of happiness (FO...

Background Depression is characterized by different forms of overgeneralization that are all assumed to play a causal role in the development and course of depression. Methods We examined, in a community sample of over 625 individuals, whether these different forms of overgeneralization are correlated and whether they are prospective predictors of...

Learning theories of depression propose that negative thinking is acquired through subsequent rewarding experiences and is often resistant to change even when it becomes associated with punishment. We examined whether this persistency of negative thinking is related to current and future levels of depressive symptoms among adolescents. Persistency...

Background Improving future thinking, such as characteristics of specificity, detail, and use of mental imagery, may be one means to reduce anhedonia, particularly in a Major Depressive Episode (MDE) in which future thinking is impaired. The current study aimed to test this using a validated program, Future Event Specificity Training (FEST). Metho...

Several decades of research have established reduced autobiographical memory specificity, or overgeneral memory, as an important cognitive factor associated with the risk for and maintenance of a range of psychiatric diagnoses. In measuring this construct, experimenters code autobiographical memories for the presence or absence of a single temporal...

The sharing of autobiographical memories (AM) serves vital social functions such as eliciting social support from others. The current study investigated the contribution of different properties of shared memories (emotional valence, detail) and the sharer (gender) in influencing the amount of offered social support and liking following self-disclos...

Objectives Despite the growing popularity of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), little is known about the neural connectivity changes that underlie the effects of MBI. The aim of this systematic review was to summarize the effects of MBI on functional brain connectivity. Methods We summarized findings of longitudinal controlled studies invest...

General Audience Summary Emotional and practical support from other people can protect us from mental health problems. However, not everyone receives the support that they need when they need it. There is evidence that people who have difficulty retrieving autobiographical memories related to specific events from their past receive less support fro...

Event centrality is defined as the extent to which a memory of a traumatic event forms a reference point for people’s identity and attribution of meaning to other experiences in their life. Event centrality is typically measured with the Centrality of Event Scale (CES; Berntsen & Rubin, 2006). The present study’s first aim was to investigate the un...

Introduction Infertility and its treatment bring a considerable emotional burden. Increasing evidence demonstrates the effectiveness of smartphone-delivered mindfulness apps for reducing symptoms of emotional distress in both clinical and non-clinical populations. Evidence on this topic in women, men and couples experiencing infertility is currentl...

Anxiety disorders are effectively treated with exposure therapy, but relapse remains high. Fear may reinstate after reoccurrence of the negative event because the expectancy of the aversive outcome (unconditioned stimulus [US]) is adjusted but not its evaluation. Imagery rescripting (ImRs) is an intervention that is proposed to work through revalua...

Objective: Improving future thinking may be one means to reduce anhedonia, particularly in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in which future thinking is impaired. The current study therefore examined whether enhancing future thinking is a viable method of reducing anhedonia in MDD. Methods: Participants (N=177; 80.8% women; M age=43.7, SD=11.8) with...

The COVID-19 pandemic strongly impacts adolescents' mental health, a population particularly vulnerable to mental disorders, highlighting the need to identify protective factors against COVID-19 related psychological distress to inform policies and intervention strategies. Previous research suggests that mindfulness may be a promising factor that c...

This project encompasses three studies that explore the association between autobiographical memory sharing and social support. We include data, scripts and materials for all studies and in addition, study 3 is pre-registered.

Objective: Memory Specificity Training (MeST) improves the recall of past personal experiences, an impairment in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Extending on previous findings that computerised MeST (c-MeST) improves memory specificity and depressive symptoms in adults, this study aimed to answer two questions: 1) does c-MeST improve memory specif...

Co-rumination has consistently been shown to be maladaptive in the context of emotional well-being. However, not much is known about factors that predict one’s tendency to co-ruminate. The current study investigated temperament, attachment, and gender as predictors of co-rumination trajectories in a sample of 1549 early and middle adolescents from...

Episodic future thinking (EFT) refers to the mental simulation of possible future events; a crucial mental process in adaptation. Psychiatric disorders are associated with deficits in recalling episodic memory, however, no study has reviewed the empirical literature to assess for similar deficits in EFT. A systematic review comparing psychiatric gr...

Although relationships between co-rumination and depressive symptoms have often been found, little research attention has been given to mechanisms underlying this association. The current study investigated brooding rumination as a mediator of the relationship between co-rumination and depressive symptoms. Analyses were performed on data of 1549 ad...

Introduction Adolescents with chronic conditions often experience high levels of stress, anxiety and depression, and reduced quality of life. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been found to improve emotional distress in clinical and non-clinical populations and are a promising technique to support adolescents with chronic conditions in ma...

Memory Specificity Training (MeST) is an intervention developed from basic science that has found clinical utility. MeST uses cued recall exercises to target the difficulty that some people with emotional disorders have in recalling personally experienced events. MeST is simple enough to be delivered alongside traditional interventions or online by...

Given modest response and high relapse after treatment for Major Depressive Episodes (MDE), the development and refinement of treatments to target cognitive vulnerabilities is indicated. Memory Specificity Training (MeST) remediates deficits in recalling detailed memories of past experiences through repeated practice of autobiographical memory retr...

This investigation examined conflicting suggestions regarding the association between problems retrieving specific autobiographical memories and the tendency to retrieve the details of these memories. We also examined whether these tendencies are differentially related to depression symptoms. U.S., Belgian, Hong Kong and Japanese participants retri...

Background: Characteristic of the cardinal symptom of anhedonia, people with clinical depression report lower levels of anticipatory pleasure. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. This is the first study to assess whether, and to what extent, phenomenological characteristics of episodic future think...

This investigation examined conflicting suggestions regarding the association between problems retrieving specific autobiographical memories and the tendency to retrieve the details of these memories. We also examined whether these tendencies are differentially related to depression symptoms. U.S., Belgian, Hong Kong and Japanese participants retri...

Background: Repetitive Negative Thinking (RNT) is a well-established predictor in adolescents of emotional problems, such as depression. Surprisingly little research, however, has looked at the relative importance of RNT vs. more interpersonally relevant variables in the context of depression, such as loneliness and lack of social connectedness....

Background Many breast cancer survivors suffer from cognitive complaints after cancer treatment, affecting their quality of life. The objective of this pilot study was to investigate the effect of a blended‐care mindfulness‐based intervention (MBI) on chemotherapy‐related cognitive impairment and functional brain changes. Furthermore, correlations...

Background: Memory Specificity Training (MeST) is a cognitive training program targeting a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor: a reduced ability to recall specific autobiographical memories, called reduced Autobiographical Memory (rAMS). Due to the simplicity of this intervention and its foundation in basic science, training practitioners how to...

Various psychological disorders, such as major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders, share cognitive avoidance as one of the main mechanisms underlying symptom severity and maintenance. A valid and reliable measure that covers a broad array of cognitive avoidance strategies is therefore instrumental, though currently greedily missing. The Ques...

A range of psychiatric disorders are characterised by impairments in episodic future thinking (EFT), and particularly simulating specific, spatiotemporally-located future events. No study has examined whether training can lead to sustained improvement in specific EFT. In this study, participants (N = 60; M age = 31, SD = 13.2) were randomized to a...

Background: Mindfulness has been applied to improve cancer care by enhancing psychological well-being. However, little is known about its impact on cognitive impairment experienced by cancer patients after chemotherapy. Mindfulness may be relevant in tackling cognitive impairment by decreasing emotional distress and fatigue, by decreasing inflamma...

Background & objectives Previous research shows that difficulty disengaging from negative (self-related) stimuli (i.e. negative self-referential processing; NSP) is a vulnerability factor for depression (Gotlib & Joormann, 2010) and contributes to its recurrence (LeMoult, Kircanski, Prasad, & Gotlib, 2017). The Emotional Reversal Learning Task (ERL...

Background: Given modest response and high relapse after treatment for Major Depressive Episodes (MDE), the development and refinement of treatments to target cognitive vulnerabilities is indicated. Memory Specificity Training (MeST) remediates deficits in recalling detailed memories of past experiences through repeated practice of autobiographical...

Background: Mindfulness has been applied to improve cancer care by enhancing psychological well-being. However, little is known about its impact on cognitive impairment experienced by cancer patients after chemotherapy. Mindfulness may be relevant in tackling cognitive impairment by decreasing emotional distress and fatigue, by decreasing inflammat...

A range of psychiatric disorders are characterised by impairments in episodic future thinking (EFT), and particularly simulating specific, spatiotemporally-located future events. To date, no study has examined whether training can lead to sustained improvement in the specificity of EFT. In this study, participants (N=60; M age=31, SD=13.2) were ran...

Background: Youth depression is highly prevalent and is related to impairments in academic, social and behavioural functioning. Evidence-based treatments are available, but many young people do not respond or sufficiently recover with first-line options, and a significant proportion experience relapse. Consequently, there is clear scope to enhance...

Objectives: Reduced autobiographical memory specificity (rAMS) is a vulnerability factor found across unipolar depression (UD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), eating disorder, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder (BD). A group delivered psychological therapy training called Memory Specificity Training (MeST) remediates rAMS in UD and PTSD, w...

Background: Mindfulness has been applied to improve cancer care by enhancing psychological well-being. However, little is known about its impact on cognitive impairment experienced by cancer patients after chemotherapy. Mindfulness may be relevant in tackling cognitive impairment by decreasing emotional distress and fatigue, by decreasing inflammat...

Future-oriented variants of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) are often used to assess the generation of specific episodic future thoughts, however, as yet the underlying factor structure of items in this modified test has not been examined. Therefore, over two studies we examined the factor structure and validity of an episodic future thinkin...

Objectives In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the assessment of mindfulness skills. The present study describes the validation of the Dutch Comprehensive Inventory of Mindfulness Experiences (CHIME) and the development of a short form. Methods The original scale was translated into Dutch. The psychometric properties of the CHIME...

Background: Characteristic of the cardinal symptom of anhedonia, people with clinical depression report lower levels of anticipatory pleasure. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying these deficits are poorly understood. This is the first study to assess whether, and to what extent, phenomenological characteristics of episodic future think...

Background: Adolescence is characterized by an increased vulnerability for internalizing psychopathologies such as depression and anxiety. A positive association between anxiety and depression has consistently been found in research. However, the specific direction of this association is less clear. In this study, we investigated the temporal asso...

Exposure to negative life stress has been associated with difficulty retrieving memories for specific autobiographical events, with important consequences for the emergence of emotional disorders. We examined whether social support can protect against the effects of negative events on memory specificity. University students (N = 143) were assigned...

Background and objectives: Memory Specificity Training (MeST), a group training protocol, is effective in improving autobiographical memory specificity (AMS), and in so doing, reducing emotional disorder symptoms amongst clinical groups. We examined MeST's effectiveness when the core component (memory specificity trials) is offered online and indi...

Sharing specific autobiographical events is likely to influence the support people give us; a person who shares little detail of their lives may be unlikely to attract social support and this may in turn contribute towards anxious and depressive symptoms. Participants (N = 142) reported memories evoked by negative and positive cue words and these m...

Background: The ability to retrieve specific autobiographical memories decreases with cognitive aging. This decline is clinically relevant due to its association with impairments in problem solving, daily functioning, and depression. A therapist-delivered group training protocol, Memory Specificity Training (MeST), has been shown to enhance the ret...

Event centrality is defined as the extent to which the memory of a traumatic event forms a reference point for personal identity and the attribution of meaning to other experiences in a person’s life. The current study investigated the psychometric properties of the Dutch translation of the Centrality of Event Scale (CES; Berntsen & Rubin, 2006) an...

Objectives Unaccompanied refugee minors (UMs) experience worry and rumination, owing to living in refugee shelters and confronting many stressors that range from finances to health problems to personal safety concerns. The purpose of this study was to explore the feasibility of a mindfulness-based intervention (MBI) for UMs residing at the shelters...

Background: Mindfulness has been applied to improve cancer care by enhancing psychological well-being. However, little is known about its impact on cognitive impairment experienced by cancer patients after chemotherapy. Mindfulness may be relevant in tackling cognitive impairment by decreasing emotional distress and fatigue, by decreasing inflammat...

Background Accumulating evidence shows that a cognitive factor associated with a worsening of depressive symptoms amongst people with and without diagnoses of depression – reduced Autobiographical Memory (rAMS) – can be ameliorated by a group cognitive training protocol referred to as Memory Specificity Training (MeST). When transporting interventi...

Background and objectives: Depressed people hold positive beliefs about negative cognition (e.g., rumination is useful to find a solution), which may motivate those individuals to engage in sustained negative thinking. However, in reality, rumination often leads to unfavorable outcomes. Thus, such beliefs create a large discrepancy between one's e...

The tendency to recall events from one's past in a non-specific and overgeneral way has been found to predict the onset and severity of a range of emotional disorders. Memory Specificity Training (MeST) was devised a decade ago in order to target and modify this tendency so as to reduce the symptoms of emotional disorder or to reduce the risk that...

Introduction Major depression is a prevalent and debilitating disorder, but many sufferers do not receive support or respond to current treatments. The development of easily accessible and low-intensity treatments that have clear cognitive mechanisms of change is indicated. Memory specificity training (MeST) is an intervention for depression that t...

Future-oriented variants of the Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) are often used to assess the generation of specific episodic future thoughts, however, as yet the underlying factor structure of items in this modified test has not been examined. Therefore, over two studies we examined the factor structure and validity of an episodic future thinkin...

Introduction:Major Depression is a prevalent and debilitating disorder, but many sufferers do not receive support or respond to current treatments. The development of easily accessible and low-intensity treatments that have clear cognitive mechanisms of change is indicated. Memory Specificity Training (MeST) is an intervention for depression that t...

BACKGROUND The ability to retrieve specific autobiographical memories decreases with cognitive aging. This decline is clinically relevant due to its association with impairments in problem solving, daily functioning and also depression. A therapist-delivered, group training protocol, Memory Specificity Training (MeST), has been shown to enhance the...

Objectives Difficulties recalling specific events from one's autobiographical past have been associated with a range of emotional disorders. We present the first examination of whether diagnoses of depression or individual differences in depression severity explain the most variance in autobiographical memory specificity. We also examine the contri...

There has been a recent growth in investigations into the neural mechanisms underlying the problems recalling specific autobiographical events that are a core feature of emotional disorders. In this review we provide the first synthesis of this literature, taking into account brain as well as cognitive mechanisms. We suggest that these problems are...

Parental emotion socialization plays a role in the development of adolescents’ emotion regulation and is associated with adolescents’ depressive symptoms. Most research has focused on parental socialization of negative affect. The scarce research on parental socialization of positive affect (PA) shows that parental downgrading responses to adolesce...

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is considered a transdiagnostic variable underlying common symptoms (e.g., depressed mood) across various mood disorders. Depressive rumination is one typical and frequent manifestation of RNT and is a well-known vulnerability factor of depression onset, maintenance and recurrence. Due to the time-related constrai...

The Autobiographical Memory Test (AMT) has been central in psychopathological studies of memory dysfunctions, as reduced memory specificity or overgeneralised autobiographical memory has been recognised as a hallmark vulnerability for depression. In the AMT, participants are asked to generate specific memories in response to emotional cue words, an...

Longitudinal studies examining the role of response styles to positive affect (i.e., dampening and enhancing) for depressive symptoms have yielded inconsistent results. We examined concurrent and prospective relations of dampening and enhancing with depressive and anhedonic symptoms, and whether these relations depend on the frequency of uplifts. E...

This manuscript is part of a special issue to commemorate professor Paul Eelen, who passed away on August 21, 2016. Paul was a clinically oriented scientist, for whom learning principles (Pavlovian or operant) were more than salivary responses and lever presses. His expertise in learning psychology and his enthusiasm to translate this knowledge to...

Repetitive negative thinking (RNT) is a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor, involved in the maintenance of a variety of emotional problems. Recently, the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire – Child version (PTQ-C) was developed as a content-independent measure of RNT in children and adolescents. The current study investigated the reliability and...

The CaRFAX model, proposed by Williams and colleagues (2006, Cognition & Emotion; 2007, Psychological Bulletin), posits that reduced autobiographical memory specificity, a key factor associated with the emergence and maintenance of emotional disorders, may result from heightened rumination. We provide the first meta-analysis of the relation between...

Co-rumination has been shown advantageous for friendship quality, but disadvantageous for mental health. Recently, two components have been distinguished, with co-brooding predicting increases in depressive symptoms and co-reflection decreases. The current study aimed to replicate these findings and investigated whether both components also show di...

The way athletes prospect future success or failure following a single success or failure is called “generalization”. This study examined the roles of an abstract “why” vs. a concrete “how” processing style on athletes’ generalization to future performances and to their self-concept (N = 668). We hypothesized that athletes in the “why” condition wo...

Psychological accounts of symptom perception put forward that symptom experiences consist of sensory-perceptual and affective-motivational components. This division is also suggested by psychometric studies investigating the latent structure of symptom reporting. To corroborate the view that the general and symptom-specific factors of a bifactor mo...

Overgeneral memory (OGM) refers to the failure to recall memories of specific personally experienced events, which occurs in various psychiatric disorders. One pathway through which OGM is theorized to develop is the avoidance of thinking of negative experiences, whereby cumulative avoidance may maladaptively generalize to autobiographical memory (...

Research has shown that how well people can differentiate between different emotional states is an essential requirement for adaptive emotion regulation. People with low levels of emotion differentiation tend to be more vulnerable to develop emotional disorders. Although we know quite a lot about the correlates of emotion differentiation, research...

Impaired ability to recall specific autobiographical memories is characteristic of depression, which when reversed, may have therapeutic benefits. This cluster-randomized controlled pilot trial investigated efficacy and aspects of acceptability, and feasibility of MEmory Specificity Training (MEST) relative to Psychoeducation and Supportive Counsel...