About
75
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Introduction
Helle Larsen conducts interdisciplinary research on social and cognitive processes related to (un)healthy behaviors (alcohol, smoking, media use) in adolescents and young adults. She focus on the interplay between context (peers, parents) and individual risk factors such as self-regulation, motivational processes, sensitivity and uses mixed-methods and ecological experimental paradigms in her work. She develops and evaluate intervention programs (e-health, in-person, network intervention).
Current institution
Additional affiliations
August 2017 - January 2022
August 2013 - July 2017
August 2011 - August 2013
Education
February 2015 - June 2018
VGCt, GITP, de Jeugdzorgacademie
Field of study
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapist (in opleiding)
September 2006 - July 2011
August 2004 - August 2006
Publications
Publications (75)
Global urbanization may present mental health challenges for youth. We investigated relationships between affective symptoms, substance use, and urban characteristics in 17–18-year-old adolescents from the Amsterdam Born Children and their Development study (N = 1682). Objectively measured urban neighbourhood characteristics (e.g. safety, poverty)...
Introduction: The effectiveness of Motivational Interviewing (MI) in addiction treatment has been proven many times. Many national treatment guidelines throughout the EU recommend MI as a method in the treatment of addiction-related and comorbid disorders. However, little is known on the availability of workforce that is able to provide sufficientl...
Background and aims. Many individuals aiming to reduce or quit cannabis use prefer self-guided interventions over formal treatment. In this feasibility study, we tested a two-week self-guided online intervention combining multiple evidence-based behavior change approaches. Participants. A total of 168 adults who used cannabis weekly, experienced se...
Purpose
Cognitive vulnerability to anxiety can partly be explained by an interplay of attentional biases and control processes. This suggests that when aiming to reduce anxiety, simultaneously reducing an attentional bias for threat and strengthening control processes would be the optimal approach. We investigated whether a combined web-based Atten...
Background
Adolescent problematic social media use (PSMU) has been increasing. Digital engagement has been associated with substance use, but little is known about the potential protective role of parents. We investigated whether screen and substance-related parental rules moderated the associations between (problematic) SMU and intake of tobacco,...
The current study aimed to test the effectiveness of ABC-training in influencing drinking behaviors during voluntary abstinence challenges, compared with Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) and sham-ApBM. We conducted two randomized controlled trial studies with three between-subject conditions: ABC-training, conventional ApBM, and sham-ApBM. Assessm...
Systematic coding of observed human behaviour (SCOBe) is used across disciplines and topics but methodological reporting is often incomplete. We developed internationally generated, interdisciplinary guidelines for methodological reporting of such research. Using Delphi methodology, a working group of 22 experts sought group consensus in three roun...
Social context plays an important role in alcohol consumption. While most studies focus on explicit social drinking norms, this study aimed to (1) develop an implicit social attunement (ISA) task to experimentally assess how willingness to drink alcohol is affected by social alcohol drinking (SAD), social non-alcohol drinking (SNAD), and social non...
Background and aims
Problematic smartphone use (PSU) has gained attention, but its definition remains debated. This study aimed to develop and validate a new scale measuring PSU-the Smartphone Use Problems Identification Questionnaire (SUPIQ).
Methods
Using two separate samples, a university community sample ( N = 292) and a general population sam...
Adolescents' management of psychopathology symptoms is crucial for preventing diagnosed conditions, yet little is known about adolescents’ specific strategies to do so. For instance, it remains unclear how adolescents manage worrying (symptom of emotional problems) or lack of focus (symptom of hyperactivity/inattention).
To address this gap, we cre...
Self-regulation has been intensely studied across developmental science disciplines in virtue of its significance to understanding and fostering adaptive functioning throughout life. Whereas research has predominantly focused on self-regulatory abilities, age-related changes in goals and motivation that underlie self-regulation have been largely ne...
Introduction
YouTube vloggers may be important socialization figures, yet their influence on adolescents' health‐related behaviors and cognitions is largely untested. In this two‐study mixed‐method project, we first assessed the extent of (non)compliance to COVID‐19 regulations by vloggers on YouTube and how viewers reacted to this. Second, we expe...
Background: Underprivileged youth in the Dominican Republic (DR) are at high risk
of acquiring the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Protective parenting practices may inhibit sexual risk-taking. Objective: We investigated whether parental involvement in a sports-based HIV prevention program increased self-efficacy to prevent HIV and safe sex beh...
Background:
Research has demonstrated the importance of the family environment in the eating and activity levels of offspring. We examined the cross-sectional associations between moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (MVPA) and diet quality of parents and the MVPA and diet quality of pre-adolescents. Interactions were tested to assess whether th...
There is a long-standing debate on the goals that underlie adolescent socially coercive behaviors, such as bullying, relational aggression, and instrumental aggression. Knowledge about these goals is critical for the development of effective interventions. Bridging evolutionary and social-cognitive perspectives, we propose and substantiate a Social...
Research demonstrates the effects of social context on individual drinking, but the underlying neural processes remain unclear. For this purpose, we developed a social multi-sensory alcohol cue-reactivity (SMAC) fMRI task. Neural activity during visually presented offers to drink beer or water while listening to audio fragments of social drinking c...
Some adolescents may be more likely to be influenced by parents and peers in their development of externalizing behavior than others. Recent research indicates that sensory processing sensitivity may underlie such differences in sensitivity to environmental influences, and specifically that individuals with higher sensory processing sensitivity may...
Background
The act of smoking has been associated with the automatic activation of approach biases towards smoking-related stimuli. However, previous research has produced mixed findings when smokers are trained to avoid such smoking-related stimuli through the application of Approach Bias Modification (ApBM). As such, this study aimed to test an i...
Introduction
Web-based smoking interventions hold potential for smoking cessation; however, many of them report low intervention usage (i.e., high levels of non-usage attrition). One strategy to counter this issue is to tailor such interventions to user subtypes if these can be identified and related to non-usage attrition outcomes. The aim of this...
Problematic smartphone use (PSU) has recently attracted a lot of attention, especially among adolescents. The knowledge about the role peer engagement might play in the development of PSU is still limited. We aimed to investigate the bidirectional relationships between PSU, the quantity of online (i.e., passive and active social media messaging on...
Dual process models posit that combinations of impulsive and reflective processes drive behaviour, and that the capacity to engage in effortful cognitive processing moderates the relation between measures of impulsive or reflective processes and actual behaviour. When cognitive resources are low, impulsive processes are more likely to drive behavio...
Background and aims
Lockdown measures aimed at limiting the number of infections and deaths from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) have introduced substantial psychosocial stressors in everyday life. We aimed to investigate the influence of the Dutch lockdown on cannabis use and cannabis use disorder (CUD) and investigate relations with chang...
Despite the theoretical importance and applied potential of situation modification as an emotion regulation strategy, empirical research on how people change situations to regulate their emotions is scarce. Meanwhile, existing paradigms typically allowed participants to avoid the entire situation, thus confounding situation modification with situat...
Objective:
This study investigated how genetic susceptibility may affect children's sensitivity to parenting practices in their development of externalizing behavior. We created a continuous polygenic index composed of 5 dopamine polymorphisms to investigate the moderating role of dopamine-related genes in shaping parent-child gene-by-environment...
Background: Automatically activated cognitive motivational processes such as the tendency to attend to or approach smoking-related stimuli (ie, attentional and approach bias) have been related to smoking behaviors. Therefore, these cognitive biases are thought to play a role in maintaining smoking behaviors. Cognitive biases can be modified with co...
Background:
Automatically activated cognitive motivational processes such as the tendency to attend to or approach smoking-related stimuli (ie, attentional and approach bias) have been related to smoking behaviors. Therefore, these cognitive biases are thought to play a role in maintaining smoking behaviors. Cognitive biases can be modified with c...
A promising avenue for health behavior change is to influence conversational valence, that is, the extent to which people talk negatively or positively about health behaviors. However, no research to date has experimentally manipulated conversational valence, thereby inhibiting conclusions about causal inferences. This study aims to fill this gap b...
Background and objectives
Attentional Bias Modification (ABM) paradigms targeting anxiety aim to reduce attentional biases for threatening stimuli and thereby reduce anxiety. Based on cognitive theories of performance and learning, elevated levels of arousal during ABM might enhance its effectiveness by making training more engaging and activating...
BACKGROUND
Automatically activated cognitive motivational processes such as the tendency to attend to or approach smoking-related stimuli (i.e., attentional and approach bias) have been related to smoking behaviors. Therefore, these cognitive biases are thought to play a role in maintaining smoking behaviors. Cognitive biases can be modified with C...
Genetic susceptibility may be associated with differences in children’s dopamine neurotransmission and make certain children more susceptible to both negative and positive parenting practices, a „for-better-for-worse“ effect. Contribution of dopamine-related genes in shaping parent–child gene–by–environment (Gc×E) interactions are discussed.
Dopamine related genes have been shown to modulate children's reward based learning and relate to how acutely children pick up punishment signals. This genetic susceptibility may express itself "outside the skin" in children's psychophysiological reactions such as heart rate variability and skin conductance responses and information processing to r...
Aims:
The aim of this study was to validate an audio simulation of culture-specific social contexts associated with smoking to provide a medium for researchers to investigate social-contextual influences on tobacco use in the laboratory.
Methods:
81 students (34.6% men; n = 28) listened to five audio simulations of peer social contexts where off...
Impulsivity is associated with smoking, difficulties quitting smoking, and approach tendencies toward cigarette stimuli among adolescents. We examined the effects of impulsivity on (a) the association between approach tendencies and adolescents’ smoking status and (b) the effectiveness of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), a smoking cessation inter...
Genetic susceptibility may moderate parenting-effects on child development both directly, and indirectly through heightened psychophysiological reactivity to parents’ reward and punishment cues
Background
Alcohol research may benefit from controlled and validated picture sets. We have constructed the Amsterdam Beverage Picture Set (ABPS), which was designed for alcohol research in general and cognitive bias measurement and modification in particular. Here, we first formulate a position on alcohol stimulus validity that prescribes that alc...
Background
We investigated the joint development between implicit approach bias and early adolescent alcohol use, and examined whether the link between approach bias and alcohol use was moderated by working memory (WM).
Methods
The current study used data from a 2‐year, 4‐wave online sample of 378 Dutch early adolescents (mean age 14.9 years, 64.8...
Background:
Alcohol research may benefit from controlled and validated picture sets. We have constructed the Amsterdam Beverage Picture Set (ABPS), which was designed for alcohol research in general and cognitive bias measurement and modification in particular. Here, we first formulate a position on alcohol stimulus validity that prescribes that a...
This pilot study conducted a preliminary examination of whether Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), a computerized task to retrain cognitive-approach biases towards smoking stimuli (a) changed approach bias for cigarettes, and (b) improved smoking cessation outcomes in adolescent smokers.
Sixty adolescent smokers received four weeks of Cognitive Beh...
Introduction: To prospectively predict the onset of use of alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana among Dutch adolescents, using behavioral and self-report measures of impulsivity-related facets. Specifically, we investigated whether behavioral measures of impulsivity predicted the onset of substance use above and beyond self-report measures of impulsiv...
Contains paragraph describing reward structure, and tables of regression results when baseline users are included.
Background: This pilot study conducted a preliminary examination of whether Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), a computerized task to retrain cognitive-approach biases towards smoking stimuli (a) changed approach bias for cigarettes, and (b) improved smoking cessation outcomes in adolescent smokers. Methods: Sixty adolescent smokers received four w...
Aims: Maintenance of smoking behavior in vulnerable individuals with depressive symptoms is believed to occur through negative and positive reinforcement processes whereby smoking dominates individual’s repertoire of behaviors effective in coping with negative affect and obtain rewards. The current study aimed 1) to test the efficacy of a novel beh...
Aims: To examine the impact of an important context variable (alcohol-specific parental rules) and an important person
variable (risky personality traits) and their interaction on prospective adolescent drinking. Methods: Participants were 252 adolescents,
67.9% female, between 13 and 16 years old. Data were collected via online assessments during...
Introduction: Research demonstrates that cognitive biases toward drug-related stimuli are correlated with substance use. This study aimed to investigate differences in cognitive biases (i.e., approach bias, attentional bias, and memory associations) between smoking and non-smoking adolescents in the US and the Netherlands. Within the group of smoke...
In the current study, we used a real-time approach to test whether engagement during an interaction was related to imitation of another person's drinking behaviour. We observed moment-to-moment engagement levels and sipping behaviour during a 30 minute interaction between same-sex confederates and participants in a semi-naturalistic ad lib drinking...
Cross-sectionally, social norms are related to heavy and problem drinking in late adolescence. A better understanding is needed regarding the longitudinal associations between social norms in younger populations and heavy and problem drinking over time. This study distinguished between descriptive (proximal reference group) and injunctive norms (pr...
Background:
That alcohol consumption is strongly influenced by the drinking behavior of social company has been demonstrated in observational research. However, not everyone is equally vulnerable to other people's drinking, and it is important to unravel which factors underlie these individual differences. This study focuses on the role of psychos...
Cross-sectional and longitudinal research has shown that favorable drinker prototypes (i.e., perceptions about the typical drinker) are related to higher levels of alcohol consumption in adolescents and college students. So far, few studies have experimentally tested the causality of this relationship and it is not clear what type of manipulation a...
Research has demonstrated that when people are with heavy-drinking peers, they consume more alcohol than when they are in the company of light-drinking peers. This social influence process has usually been investigated in clinical laboratories or seminaturalistic drinking settings such as laboratory bars. The question remains whether these robust e...
Dual-process models imply that alcohol use is related to implicit as well as explicit cognitive processes. Few studies have tested whether both types of processes are related to ad libitum drinking. In a series of three studies, we tested whether both implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions predicted the amount of alcohol consumed in an...
See publication in English: A Variable-Number-of-Tandem-Repeats Polymorphism in the Dopamine D4 Receptor Gene Affects Social Adaptation of Alcohol Use: Investigation of a Gene-Environment Interaction
Research suggests that people adapt their own drinking behavior to that of others. Studies have shown that when being in the
company of a heavy drink...
Research suggests that people adapt their own drinking behavior to that of others. Studies have shown that when being in the company of a heavy drinking peer, individuals tend to drink substantially more than when being with a non-drinking or light-drinking peer. However, not everyone is equally susceptible to other people's drinking behavior. Base...
The influence of friends and peers is theoretically one of the most consistent and important factors explaining adolescent alcohol use. However, not all adolescents are equally likely to be influenced by their friends' drinking behaviors. Genetic factors may underlie these inter-individual differences in susceptibility to the drinking behavior of f...
Research suggests that people adapt their own drinking behavior to that of others. Studies have shown that when being in the company of a heavy drinking peer, individuals tend to drink substantially more than when being with a non-drinking or light-drinking peer. However, not everyone is equally susceptible to other people’s drinking behavior. Base...
Being exposed to other people's drinking behavior has been demonstrated to influence individual's drinking levels. Imitation of alcohol consumption has mainly been investigated among same-sex drinking partners. This study examined whether imitation of alcohol consumption differs when people drink with same-sex or other-sex partners.
To test the imi...
In this three-wave longitudinal survey, we investigated bi-directional longitudinal associations between best friends and adolescents' alcohol consumption. Additionally, since the relation between best friends and adolescents' drinking may be stronger if adolescents have not consumed alcohol yet, we examined this relation not only with regard to co...
Research suggests that people adapt their own drinking behavior to that of other people. According to a genetic-differences approach, some individuals may be more inclined than others to adapt their alcohol consumption level to that of other people. Using a 3 (drinking condition) x 2 (genotype) experimental design (N = 113), we tested whether susce...
Perceptions about the type of people who drink, also referred to as drinker prototypes, may strengthen young people's motivation to engage in alcohol use. Previous research has shown that drinker prototypes are related to alcohol consumption in both adolescents and young adults. However, the evidence for the strength of these relationships remains...
Ample experimental research has found evidence for imitation of alcohol consumption in social encounters. However, these studies cannot reveal whether imitation is specifically related to alcohol and not to consumption in general. We investigated whether imitation is more evident when peers drink alcohol compared to other beverages. We observed sip...
In order to study the role of imitation in relation to drinking, alcohol consumption among two peers was examined with experiments in a naturalistic drinking setting.
In a bar lab, 135 young adults (52% women) were exposed to either a non-drinking, a light-drinking or a heavy-drinking same-sex model (i.e. a confederate) in a 30-min time-out session...
The present study examined how tolerance toward nontraditional family forms relates to family structure, by examining differences between youngsters and parents from intact and postdivorce families. We also explored whether intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward nontraditional family forms differed between intact and postdivorce familie...
The aim of this study was to longitudinally examine the moderating role of friendship quality in the association between adolescent perception of interparental conflicts and maladjustment. Participants were 1294 adolescents enrolled in the Dutch CONAMORE 2001—2006 study (Mage = 13.6 years). AMOS multigroup analyses were utilized. Results show that...
