Géraldine Petit

Catholic university of louvain

Background: While the link between trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and hypertension is established, its underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. Objective: This study tested a theoretical model exploring the moderating influence of psychological (emotion regulation) and interpersonal (social support) factors on the mediation betwe...

The Multidimensional Assessment of COVID-19-Related Fears (MAC-RF) is an 8-item self-report measure, which is based on the theoretical premise that fear responses to COVID-19 involve different yet intertwined domains (i.e., bodily, relational, cognitive, and behavioural). In this multi-step study, we tested the psychometric properties of the French...

Background: Anxiety and depression are psychopathological states frequently co-occurring with severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD). These symptoms generally disappear with abstinence but may persist in some patients, increasing the relapse risk. Methods: The cerebral cortex thickness of 94 male patients with SAUD was correlated with symptoms of de...

Purpose In a pilot study including 35 patients with apparently treatment-resistant hypertension (ATRH), we documented associations between psychological profile, drug adherence and severity of hypertension. The current study aims to confirm and expand our findings in a larger and more representative sample of patients with ATRH, using controlled hy...

The COVID-19 pandemic has put healthcare workers under important psychological pressure. Concerns have been raised regarding the mental health and psychological status of healthcare workers and have underlined the need for institutions to develop long-term interventions to support their resilience. The current case study presents the way a large un...

The aim of the study was to assess drug adherence, as well as association of psychological factors with both drug adherence and severity of hypertension in two subtypes of patients with apparently treatment‐resistant hypertension (ATRH): younger patients with uncomplicated hypertension (YURHTN) versus patients ≥60‐year‐old and/or with a history of...

Background: The Democratic Republic of the Congo underwent more than 25 years of war resulting in millions of deaths and in survivants struggling with trauma related disorders. The factors contributing to acute stress disorder following a traumatic event remain little understood. Emotion regulation might play a role in the development of acute stre...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented stressor for frontline healthcare workers, notably increasing acute stress disorder and depression rates. Emotion regulation and social support could be major protective factors against such psychopathological states, but their role has not been explored outside Western contexts. Objective: To...

Objective: Altered psychological profiles are associated with drug adherence and drug resistance in patients with resistant hypertension (RHTN). However, treatment resistance may also result from increased arterial stiffness and target organ damage. The aim of this study was to assess the association of psychological factors with both drug adheren...

Objective: In a pilot study including 35 patients with resistant hypertension, we documented associations between psychological profile, drug adherence and severity of hypertension. The current study aims to confirm and expand our findings in a larger sample of patients with resistant hypertension, using controlled hypertensive patients as compara...

Coronavirus disease 2019 has spread rapidly over the globe and has put an unprecedent psychological pressure on health care workers (HCWs). The present study aimed at quantifying the psychological consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on HCWs during and after the first wave and identify sociodemographic, situational, and psychological risk/protecti...

Background: Numerous risk factors have been involved in the pathogenesis of hypertension. The contribution of psychological factors, including post-traumatic stress disorder, remains largely underexplored, despite their potential role in hypertension. Objectives: We compared the prevalence of trauma, post-traumatic stress and other psychological...

Aims: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the relation between anhedonia and depression in alcohol use disorders (AUD) during detoxification: Is trait anhedonia measured at the beginning of detoxification predictive of depressive symptoms observed at the end? Does state anhedonia recover during detoxification as depression does? Gender di...

Background: Management of resistant hypertension (RHTN) is challenging and often implies the use of complex polypharmacy and interventional therapies. The main objectives of this study were (i) to describe the characteristics of patients with RHTN referred to two expert centres; (ii) to identify predictors of blood pressure (BP) control after inten...

Many studies have reported that heavy substance use is associated with impaired response inhibition. Studies typically focused on associations with a single substance, while polysubstance use is common. Further, most studies compared heavy users with light/non-users, though substance use occurs along a continuum. The current mega-analysis accounted...

Si l’existence de liens entre consommation éthylique et symptômes thymiques paraît évidente, la nature et les mécanismes qui sous-tendent ces interactions s’avèrent en revanche très complexes et moins bien connus. Cet article, qui s’appuie essentiellement sur des données empiriques et destinées aux cliniciens, vise à décrire de quelle manière la co...

Purpose: Patients with apparent treatment-resistant hypertension (a-TRH) are often poorly adherent to drug treatment and have an unusual personal history and psychological profile. The aim of this study was to identify predictors of drug adherence and drug resistance in a cohort of patients with aTRH, with emphasis on psychological characteristics...

In contrast to childhood ADHD that is characterized by inattention, impulsivity and hyperactivity, most adults with ADHD predominantly exhibit inattention. We used a new oddball paradigm using implicit navigational images and analysed EEG dynamics with swLORETA inverse modelling of the evoked potential generators to study cortical processing in adu...

Objective There is a lack of consensus regarding the extent to which cognitive dysfunctions may recover upon cessation of alcohol intake by alcohol-dependents (AD), and the divergent findings are most likely due to methodological differences between the various studies. The present study was aimed at conducting a very strict longitudinal study of c...

Background: Alcohol craving is a major cause of relapse in alcohol-dependent (AD) patients. It is closely related to the high depression and anxiety symptoms that are frequently observed at the early stages of abstinence, and these comorbid symptoms might thus constitute a relapse factor when they persist after detoxification. As these negative af...

Brain dynamics is at the basis of top performance accomplishment in sports. The search for neural biomarkers of performance remains a challenge in movement science and sport psychology. The noninvasive nature of high-density electroencephalography (EEG) recording has made it a most promising avenue for providing quantitative feedback to practitione...

Alcohol-dependent patients have difficulty recognizing social cues such as emotional facial expressions, prosody, and postures. However, most researchers describing these difficulties rely on labeling tasks. It therefore remains difficult to disentangle genuine emotion-decoding problems from emotion-labeling impairments. In the present study, 35 re...

Background: The main aim of this study was to investigate, in alcohol-dependent (AD) patients, the use of the 5 emotion regulation strategies specified in Gross's (1998, Rev Gen Psychol, 2, 271) process model of emotion regulation with the use of a semi-structured interview allowing a detailed and high-quality assessment of emotion regulation stra...

Background: The continuation of binge drinking is associated with the development of neurocognitive brain abnormalities similar to those observed in patients with alcohol dependence. Alcohol cue reactivity constitutes a risk marker for alcohol dependence. Through event-related potentials (ERPs), we aimed to examine its potential presence as well a...

Background: Alcohol dependence is a chronic relapsing disease. The impairment of response inhibition and alcohol-cue reactivity are the main cognitive mechanisms that trigger relapse. Despite the interaction suggested between the two processes, they have long been investigated as two different lines of research. The present study aimed to investiga...

Early adolescence is a key developmental period for the initiation of alcohol use, and consumption among adolescents is characterized by drinking in high quantities. At the same time, adolescence is characterized by rapid biological transformations including dramatic changes in the brain, particularly in the prefrontal cortex and the mesocorticolim...

Aims: While the relationship between chronic exposure to alcohol and neurobiological damage is well established, deleterious brain effects of binge drinking in youths have only recently been studied. Methods: Narrative review of studies of brain disturbances associated with binge drinking as assessed by neuroimaging (EEG and IRMf techniques in part...

While the relationship between chronic exposure to alcohol and neurobiological damage is well established, deleterious brain effects of binge drinking in youths have only recently been studied. Narrative review of studies of brain disturbances associated with binge drinking as assessed by neuroimaging (EEG and IRMf techniques in particular) in adol...

Background. Peripheral cytokines are related to cognitive impairment in delirium and dementia. During alcohol detoxification, elevation of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines is reported. However, the relationship between peripheral cytokines and cognitive function in alcohol dependence has not been examined. We characterised the serum cytokine pr...

Cerebral dysfunction is a common feature of both chronic alcohol abusers and binge drinkers. Here, we aimed to study whether, at equated behavioral performance levels, binge drinkers exhibited increased neural activity while performing simple cognitive tasks. Thirty-two participants (16 binge drinkers and 16 matched controls) were scanned using fun...

Increased alcohol cue-reactivity and altered inhibitory processing have been reported in heavy social drinkers and alcohol-dependent patients, and are associated with relapse. In social drinkers, these two processes have been usually studied separately by recording event-related potentials (ERPs) during rapid picture presentation. The aim of our st...

Episodic excessive alcohol consumption (i.e., binge drinking) is now considered to be a major concern in our society. Previous studies have shown that alcohol cues can capture attentional resources in chronic alcoholic populations and that the phenomenon is associated with the development and maintenance of alcoholism. Using event-related potential...

Alcohol dependence constitutes a serious worldwide public health problem. The last few decades have seen many pharmacological studies devoted to the improvement of alcoholism treatment. Although psychosocial treatments (e.g. individual or group therapy) have historically been the mainstay of alcoholism treatment, a successful approach for alcohol d...

Increasing knowledge of the anatomical structures and cellular processes underlying psychiatric disorders may help bridge the gap between clinical signs and basic physiological processes. Accordingly, considerable insight has been gained in recent years into a common psychiatric condition, i.e., chronic alcoholism. We reviewed various physiological...