Gerben J Westerhof

University of Twente | UT · Department of Psychology, Health and Technology (PHT)

Introduction Personality disorders (PDs) cause much suffering. In treating patients with PDs, it is important not only to focus on reducing symptoms, but also on promoting psychological adaptability and well-being. The experiential nature of Creative Arts and Psychomotor Therapies (CAPTs) contributes to working on psychological adaptability and imp...

Early grief reactions have been hypothesized to fluctuate within persons and to be one of the strongest predictors of Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) offers an opportunity to examine (early) PGD dynamics and contextual factors in daily contexts. For this, however, a brief and valid ESM scale is needed to accura...

Background Compassion is an essential and beneficial value in mental healthcare. However, how digital mental health interventions influence compassion in treatment has not been systematically investigated, due to the lack of appropriate measurement instruments. To address this gap, we developed the Compassionate Technology Scale for Professionals (...

Problem Inpatient psychotherapy can offer positive treatment outcomes for people with complex personality pathology who do not benefit from outpatient treatment. Little is known about how the development of schema modes during treatment relates to long‐term development of symptoms, well‐being and schema modes. Method This study employed a naturali...

Mental illness and mental well-being are supposedly related, distinct continua of mental health. Whether this association generalizes to bereaved people and is stable over time remains uncertain. Moreover, criminal justice system (CJS) involvement may pose a risk to the different continua of mental health of bereaved people. Using (multi-group) con...

Sensor-based technologies can collect objective and real-time data on physiological, behavioral, and contextual factors related to mental disorders. This not only holds potential for mental healthcare but also comes with challenges, such as handling large amounts of data and supporting the integration of sensors in clinical practice. This systemati...

Treatment assignment for patients with personality disorders (PDs) involves a complex process consisting of diagnostic assessment and deciding on the most appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment. This article describes the development of a checklist for systematic analysis of life stories to support reflective and transparent assignment of patients...

Background: Compassion is an essential and beneficial value in mental healthcare. However, how digital mental health interventions influence compassion in treatment has not been systematically investigated, due to the lack of appropriate measurement instruments. To address this gap, we developed the Compassionate Technology Scale for Professionals...

This poster was presented at the NtVP (Dutch association for psychotrauma) conference by the first author.

Background: Participating in a criminal trial may increase the likelihood of developing psychopathology. In 2021, people bereaved by a plane disaster (flight MH17) had the opportunity to deliver a victim personal statement (VPS) in Dutch court. Objective: This longitudinal mixed-method study examined different aspects of 84 bereaved people’s exper...

Enhancing personal recovery in persons with personality disorders is an important but understudied topic. Guided by the framework for developing and evaluating complex interventions of the U.K. Medical Research Council, this study follows a qualitative approach with the first aim of using the best scientific, professional, and client expertise to d...

Objectives Anxiety and mood disorders greatly affect the quality of life for individuals worldwide. A substantial proportion of patients do not sufficiently improve during evidence-based treatments in mental healthcare. It remains challenging to predict which patients will or will not benefit. Moreover, the limited research available on predictors...

To explore mental health associations during eating disorder (ED) treatment. Based on the dual-continua model of mental health, general and ED-specific psychopathology, as well as emotional, psychological, and social well-being were considered as mental health domains. Network analyses with panel data were applied to explore within- (temporal and c...

Background: Participating in a criminal trial may increase the likelihood of developing psychopathology. In 2021, people bereaved by a plane disaster (flight MH17) had the opportunity to deliver a victim personal statement (VPS) in Dutch court. Objective: This longitudinal mixed-method study examined different aspects of 84 bereaved people’s exper...

Background: An essential value in mental health care is compassion: awareness of suffering, tolerating difficult feelings in the face of suffering, and acting or being motivated to alleviate suffering. Currently, technologies for mental health care are on the rise and could offer several advantages, such as more options for self-management by clien...

Introduction The ability to adapt is a core aspect of daily human life. Recent models and theories emphasize its essential role for health and well-being. It concerns the perceived ability to readjust and actively deal with the psychosocial consequences of challenging events. While many questionnaires measure competences related to adaptability to...

This article updates and extends an earlier meta-analysis (Westerhof et al., 2014) on the longitudinal effects of subjective aging (SA) on health outcomes. A systematic search in different databases (APA PsycInfo, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus) resulted in 99 articles, reporting on 107 studies. Participants: Studies had a median sample size of...

Introduction Studying written life stories of patients with personality disorders (PDs) may enhance knowledge of how they understand themselves, others and the world around them. Comparing the construction of their life stories before psychotherapy to their reconstruction after psychotherapy may provide insight in therapeutic changes in the underst...

Nabestaanden van levens- en dood-door-schulddelicten hebben het recht om tijdens de rechtszaak te spreken. Sinds 1 juli 2016 is dit spreekrecht onbeperkt; nabestaanden mogen zich uitlaten over de verdachte(n), het strafproces en hun persoonlijke leed. Kortom: alles waarover ze willen spreken. Het spreekrecht heeft onder andere tot doel slachtoffers...

Longitudinal effects of subjective age on adult health and survival are well-documented (Westerhof et al., 2014). This systematic review provides an updated and expanded evaluation of the state of the field. A systematic search in PsycInfo, Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed resulted in 103 articles: 19 articles from the 2014 meta-analysis and 84 n...

Objective: There are considerable differences in how eating disorder (ED) patients respond to treatment. This study aimed to identify change trajectories of mental health during treatment. Method: Longitudinal data of 442 patients was used with five time points during a year of outpatient treatment. ED psychopathology and well-being were used as pr...

BACKGROUND An essential value in mental health care is compassion: awareness of suffering, tolerating difficult feelings in the face of suffering, and acting or being motivated to alleviate suffering. Currently, technologies for mental health care are on the rise and could offer several advantages, such as more options for self-management by client...

Background: An essential value in mental health care is compassion: awareness of suffering, tolerating difficult feelings in the face of suffering, and acting or being motivated to alleviate suffering. Currently, technologies for mental health care are on the rise and could offer several advantages, such as more options for self-management by clie...

“All real living is meeting”. This study presents an empirical study of the way a sense of meaning‐as‐connectedness is brought about in a group counseling intervention in which meaningful moments are shared. Results from a thematic analysis exemplify and at one point extend Buber's philosophy of meeting.

Nowadays, traditional forms of psychotherapy are increasingly complemented by online interactions between client and counselor. In (some) web-based psychotherapeutic interventions, meetings are exclusively online through asynchronous messages. As the active ingredients of therapy are included in the exchange of several emails, this verbal exchange...

This position paper proposes a model for systematic integration of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) in mental healthcare. On the one hand, PPIs can contribute to the decrease of dysfunctional processes underlying mental illness. This evidence is at the core of the new domains of positive clinical psychology and positive psychiatry. On the o...

This paper describes a randomized controlled trial on the Online Life Story Book (OLSB), a digital reminiscence intervention for people with (very) mild dementia living at home. The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of the OLSB on (i) neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in persons with dementia and (ii) the distress and quality of l...

Background: Perceived well-being is key in the recovery from major depressive disorder (MDD). It is however unclear how well-being relates to other aspects of recovery, like depressive symptom severity, acceptance, disease identification and social participation. In patients with MDD we investigated 1) changes in these five concepts over time, 2)...

Personal recovery has become a guiding paradigm in mental health services. Most research on recovery is based on the exploration of personal stories of service users through verbal methods. As not everyone with psychiatric problems is able to verbally formulate a recovery narrative, the current study assesses personal recovery through PhotoVoice, w...

Introduction: Developing a good therapeutic alliance is considered essential for the responsible delivery of psychotherapy. Text-based digital psychotherapy has become increasingly common, yet much remains unclear about the alliance and its importance for delivering mental health care via a digital format. To employ text-based digital therapies res...

Objective: Psychometric network analysis has led to new possibilities to assess the structure and dynamics of psychiatric disorders. The current study focuses on mental health networks in patients with anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, binge eating disorder and other specified eating disorders (EDs). Method: Network analyses were applied with f...

Purpose Personality functioning is strongly linked to well-being in the general population. Yet, there is a lack of scientific knowledge about the pathways between personality trait facets and emotional, psychological and social well-being in ED patients. The general aim was to examine potential associations between maladaptive personality trait fa...

The added value of autobiographical reflexivity and persuasive technology (PT) compared to critical reflection was examined in a blended learning course. The main outcome measure was achieving a professional identity (PI). A Randomized Control Trial (RCT) was carried out with three measurement points (baseline, post-course, follow-up) and had three...

Objective In mental health care, treatment effects are commonly monitored by symptom severity measures. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between symptom severity and well‐being in the treatment of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). Methods Adult MDD outpatients (n = 77) were administered the Quick Inventory of Depressiv...

To strengthen students' professional identity (PI), it is vital to give reflection a central place in higher education. The aim of this study is to determine the extent to which students reflect on five components of PI (self-image, self-esteem, task perception, job motivation and future perspective) and at what reflection level. Twenty-five reflec...

Meaningful moments are specific events in life that are felt to be of great value and significance. This empirical study presents a framework on the way a sense of meaning emerges from these moments. Out of an existing data set of narratives of meaningful moments, a purposeful sample of nine narratives was chosen from different participants, all mi...

Person-centred care requires improved documentation of nursing home resident wellbeing, e.g. by nursing staff proxy assessments. Previous studies mainly focused on proxy self-report agreement of quality of life of people with dementia, using lengthy questionnaires. This is the first study to investigate how well nursing staff assess residents’ well...

Whereas blended learning can deliver several benefits to students in higher education, their achievement depends on how exactly it is designed. A participatory design is recommendable to try to meet the needs of all stakeholders. The Persuasive System Design-model can be used to motivate students during the online part of the course. In the design...

The Happiness Route is a positive psychology intervention (PPI) for lonely people with health problems and low socio-economic status with the aim to improve their well-being. To be able to pursue an intrinsically motivated activity, participants received a budget of €500. A randomized controlled trial showed that the intervention was just as effect...

Background Our objective was to evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of the positive psychology intervention ‘Happiness Route’ compared to an active control condition in a vulnerable population with an accumulation of health and psychosocial problems. Methods We conducted a randomized, single-blind, actively-controlled, parallel group...

Introduction People with intellectual disability have a higher chance of developing mental disorders than the general population. Yet, few evidence‐based interventions exist. This article evaluates My Lifestory, a narrative intervention tailored to people with intellectual disability and depressive or trauma‐related complaints. Method A quasi‐expe...

Person-centered care (PCC) interventions have the potential to improve resident well-being in nursing homes, but can be difficult to implement. This study investigates perceived facilitators and barriers reported by nursing staff to using a PCC intervention consisting of three components: assessment of resident well-being, planning of well-being su...

INTRODUCTIONOrange is afree data mining toolkit developed by the Bioinformatics Laboratory of the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia.The software offers a large collectionof modules that can be combined in auser-friendly graphical interfaceto form arbitrary processing pipelines. Orange consists of open source Python code and canbe extended with cu...

Spirituality can support the adjustment process of people with cancer, by forming a meaning system that supports understanding of the cause and implications of the experience and that provides coping strategies. The different ways in which spiritual meaning systems might fulfill these roles were examined among 20 people who were treated for cancer...

Introduction: In this study, a blended learning course, designed using a participatory design approach and Persuasive Technology (PT), was evaluated by students and teachers. The use of a participatory design and PT may help facilitate a blended learning course that motivates students and supports teachers in this relatively new field. Method: Stud...

Precious memories (PM) is a life review intervention for depression in older adults with no to mild cognitive decline that has been implemented in multiple nursing homes (NHs) in the Netherlands. Previous research suggested its relevance but questioned its applicability. Therefore, this research aimed to (1) investigate the applicability of PM, and...

Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR) connects within-therapeutic change processes to outcomes. The labour intensity of qualitative methods limit their use to small scale studies. Automated text-analyses (e.g. text mining) provide means for analysing large scale text patterns. We aimed to provide an overview of the frequently used qualitative...

Chronic pain outcomes are traditionally defined in terms of disability and illness. A definition of adaptive functioning in the context of chronic pain beyond the mere absence of negative outcomes, is the ability to flourish (i.e., experience emotional, psychological and social well-being; Keyes, 2002). We explored in two chronic pain samples the p...

Life review builds on a naturally occurring process in later life and entails attributing meaning to positive and negative memories across the lifespan. The current meta‐analysis focuses on the best evidence of life review as a therapeutic intervention to reduce depressive symptoms in older adults. A systematic literature search resulted in eleven...

Background: Patients with borderline personality disorder experience great difficulties in regulating their emotions. They often are unable to effectively detect their emotional arousal and struggle to timely apply learned techniques for emotion regulation. Although the use of continuous wearable biofeedback has been repeatedly suggested as an opti...

We present a demonstration of the board game named “Babbelbord” that stimulates narrative reminiscence in a novel interactive, personalized and entertaining way for people with dementia. Narrative reminiscence is part of reminiscence therapy which is often used in dementia care as it reduces neuropsychiatric symptoms, and therefore improves the qua...

Analyzing emotional valence in spontaneous speech remains complex and challenging. We present an acoustic and lexical analysis of emotional valence in spontaneous speech of older adults. Data was collected by recalling autobiographical memories through a word association task. Due to the complex and personal nature of memories, we propose a novel c...

In order to contribute to the need of spontaneous multi-modal affective databases for the automatic recognition of emotions in older adults, this paper presents a novel Dutch multi-modal database consisting of emotional memories of older adults. The data consists of positive and negative memories of older adults eliciting through two emotion relivi...

Background: Nursing staff in nursing homes is at risk for stress-related problems. Positive psychology interventions have been shown to effectively improve well-being and decrease depressive symptoms, and may be beneficial for nursing staff. However, controlled studies with nursing staff are missing. Objectives and design: This is the first stud...

Online interventions hold great potential for Therapeutic Change Process Research (TCPR), a field that aims to relate in-therapeutic change processes to the outcomes of interventions. Online a client is treated essentially through the language their counsellor uses, therefore the verbal interaction contains many important ingredients that bring abo...

Aging is often associated with inevitable biological decline. Yet research suggests that subjective aging-the views that people have about their own age and aging-contributes to how long and healthy lives they will have. Subjective age and self-perceptions of aging are the two most studied aspects of subjective aging. Both have somewhat different t...

We present a method for de-identifying Dutch medical text based on an entity tagger and rules for identifying additional entity classes. A key problem for evaluating de-identification systems is that data used for evaluation cannot be shared. We propose to use public data for evaluation, which after an automatic conversion process can be made simil...

BACKGROUND Patients with borderline personality disorder experience great difficulties in regulating their emotions. They often are unable to effectively detect their emotional arousal and struggle to timely apply learned techniques for emotion regulation. Although the use of continuous wearable biofeedback has been repeatedly suggested as option t...

Background: The digitization of society has an increasing impact on healthcare in general and, therefore, also on psychiatry. AIM: To provide an overview of digital developments and their influence on the design of future professional psychiatric care. METHOD: With the help of examples from literature, show how digitization will influence diagnost...

Familiar routines may be a source of meaning, but just as well become habitual and lose meaning. To understand this paradox, a narrative approach was used to explore how meaning is constructed in memories of familiar routines. Two types were distinguished: routines of transition and routines of harmony. Results show how meaning construction may rel...

The World Assumption Scale (WAS) is a frequently used measure in trauma research. The 32 items of the WAS are intended to represent eight assumptions about the benevolence of the world, the meaningfulness of events, and the worthiness of the self. Debate about the validity of the WAS is ongoing, particularly in terms of its empirical factor structu...

Introduction: Eating Disorders (EDs) are serious psychiatric disorders, impacting physical and psychosocial functioning, often with a chronic course and high mortality rates. The two continua model of mental health states that mental health is a complete state, that is, not merely the absence of mental illness, but also the presence of mental healt...

Life story books are frequently used to support reminiscence therapy for people with dementia. A RCT and process evaluation were conducted to study the effectiveness and implementation of the Online Life Story Book. 42 participants were randomized in an intervention or waitlist control group. Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS), quality of life (QOL) a...

Reminiscence and life review interventions have a long tradition in gerontology. They support people in recollecting, evaluating, and integrating personal memories of their lives and thereby strengthen identities, social relationships, and life purpose and meaning. They have been found to be effective in promoting mental health and well-being in la...

Even after successful completion of psychotherapy, half of the clients with a personality disorder still have problems reintegrating into social life and work. This article provides an explorative study (N = 34) on a rehabilitation treatment program that was offered to patients with personality disorders after an intensive treatment phase, with the...

In de meeste aanvragen voor subsidies voor onderzoeksgeld of interventiepraktijken wordt de volgende redenering gebruikt. Er is een probleem dat door veel ouderen ervaren wordt, zoals eenzaamheid, depressie of dementie. Dit heeft belangrijke consequenties voor hun functioneren en kwaliteit van leven. Daarom is het belangrijk onderzoek te doen of in...

Objectives There is an increasing evidence that reminiscence therapy is effective in improving cognitive functions and reducing depressive symptoms in people with dementia. Life story books (LSBs) are frequently used as a reminiscence tool to support recollecting autobiographical memories. As little is known about how LSBs are used and what type of...

1 Objective The growing evidence for the dual continua model of psychopathology and well‐being has important implications for measuring outcomes in mental health care. The aim of the current study is to validate a measure of well‐being as well as the dual continua model in adults with mood, anxiety, personality, and developmental disorders. 2 Meth...

Various authors in research on coping advise us to study spirituality from a meaning system perspective. In this approach spirituality is viewed as a part of people’s global meaning; an overarching framework of beliefs, goals, and sense of meaning. However, little is known about how spirituality is related to other global meanings to form this mean...