Inez Myin-Germeys

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Neurosciences

Background Mental health problems occur in interactions in daily life. Yet, it is challenging to bring contextual information into the therapy room. The experience sampling method (ESM) may facilitate this by assessing clients’ thoughts, feelings, symptoms, and behaviors as they are experienced in everyday life. However, the ESM is still primarily...

Robust reward sensitivity may help preserve mental well‐being in the face of adversity and has been proposed as a key stress resilience factor. Here, we present a mobile health application, “Imager,” which targets reward sensitivity by training individuals to create mental images of future rewarding experiences. We conducted a two‐arm randomized co...

Background Cross-sectional relationships between psychosocial resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as the outcome of low mental health reactivity to stressor exposure (low “stressor reactivity” [SR]), were reported during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Objective Extending these findings, we here examined prosp...

Contextual factors influence how people regulate their everyday emotions. While daily life is rich with situations that evoke emotion regulation, few studies have broadly investigated the role of context in regulating emotions in response to naturally occurring negative events. In this study, we use a structured diary technique—the Experience Sampl...

Identifying adolescents for whom social withdrawal may form a specific risk, is crucial for improving prevention and early intervention efforts. Model-based clustering on daily-life data from n=1312 Flemish general population adolescents (65% female, MAge=13.8, n=296 identifying with non-Belgian nationality or ethnicity) identified four groups with...

Although the literature suggests trait-like differences in affective and cognitive vulnerabilities between individuals with and without a history of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), little is known about how these dispositional differences are experienced in the natural environment. The present study compares the intensity, inertia, interaction, an...

In recent three decades, mental health has evolved towards a predominance of community-based care, guided by ideas on how context influences individual health and well-being. This development is a specific example of increased responsiveness to patients’ needs and preferences. More recently, the trend is amplified by digital health applications, su...

Although stress has been implicated in a broad range of somatic and mental illnesses, how this phenomenon puts individuals at risk is still unclear. In order to better understand the relationship between stress and well-being, accurate assessment of stress is crucial. Subjective appraisal and experience are key aspects of stress, but standard quest...

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) affects millions of people worldwide, but timely treatment is not often received owing in part to inaccurate subjective recall and variability in the symptom course. Objective and frequent MDD monitoring can improve subjective recall and help to guide treatment selection. Attempts have been made, with va...

Background: Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychol...

Background and Hypothesis Childhood adversity is associated with a myriad of psychiatric symptoms, including psychotic experiences (PEs), and with multiple psychological processes that may all mediate these associations. Study Design Using a network approach, the present study examined the complex interactions between childhood adversity, PEs, oth...

Background: Nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a major mental health concern. Despite increased research efforts on establishing the prevalence and correlates of the presence and severity of NSSI, we still lack basic knowledge of the course, predictors, and relationship of NSSI with other self-damaging behaviors in daily life. Such information will...

The Experience sampling method (ESM) has the potential to support person-centered care of psychotic disorders. However, clinical implementation is hampered by a lack of user involvement in the design of ESM tools. This qualitative study explored the perspective of nine people with lived experiences of psychosis. Participants reported a need to moni...

Aim: The aim of this qualitative study is to explore patients' perspectives on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for early stages of psychosis. Therefore, we interviewed participants of the INTERACT study, that quantitatively investigated Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Daily Life (ACT-DL) in combination with treatment as usual, for early sta...

Background: Alterations in heart rate (HR) may provide new information about physiological signatures of depression severity. This 2-year study in individuals with a history of recurrent major depressive disorder (MDD) explored the intra-individual variations in HR parameters and their relationship with depression severity. Methods: Data from 51...

BACKGROUND Although mental health problems occur in interaction with the natural environment, bringing this contextualized information into the therapy room is challenging. The experience sampling method (ESM) may facilitate this by assessing clients' thoughts, feelings, symptoms, and behavior as they are experienced in everyday life. However, ESM...

Emotion regulation in daily life can serve as a risk or resilience factor during times of crisis. Using the experience sampling method, the current study investigated rumination, savoring, and sharing with others in response to positive and negative events during the early COVID-19 pandemic lockdown measures among adolescents (N = 110, aged 13-20,...

Background: Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a major mental health concern. Despite increased research efforts on establishing the prevalence and correlates of the presence or severity of NSSI, we still lack basic knowledge of the course, predictors, and relationship of NSSI with other self-harming behaviors in daily life. Such information will b...

Negative symptoms are a key therapeutic target in promoting functional recovery in early psychosis intervention, but momentary negative symptom manifestations remain understudied in the early stage of illness. We employed an experience-sampling methodology (ESM) to evaluate momentary affective experiences, hedonic capacity for an event recalled, cu...

Key symptoms of anxiety include experiencing unpleasant emotions and hyperarousal. Growing evidence suggests the role of delayed affective recovery from stress (DAR) in their maintenance and development on a day-to-day basis. We aimed to investigate whether DAR is linked to current and future anxiety symptoms, independently of depressive symptoms....

Affective reactivity to daily stressors are increased in individuals in the early stages of psychosis. Studies in psychosis patients and healthy individuals at increased psychosis risk show altered neural reactivity to stress in limbic (i.e., hippocampus [HC] and amygdala), prelimbic (i.e., ventromedial prefrontal cortex [vmPFC] and ventral anterio...

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a challenge for young people’s positive future orientation and mental health. To understand the role of daily-life future orientation in mental health during the pandemic, we used the Experience Sampling Method to investigate adolescents’ (aged 13 – 21) daily life future orientation and anticipatory emotion regulation in...

Background: The role of loneliness and social exclusion in the development of paranoia is largely unexplored. Negative affect may mediate potential associations between these factors. We investigated the temporal relationships of daily-life loneliness, felt social exclusion, negative affect, and paranoia across the psychosis continuum. Method: S...

and circadian function are leading candidate markers for early relapse identification in MDD. Consumer-grade wearable devices may offer opportunity for remote and real-time examination of dynamic changes in sleep. Objective: We used FitBit data from individuals with recurrent MDD to describe longitudinal associations of sleep duration, quality, and...

BACKGROUND Cross-sectional relationships between psychosocial resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as the outcome of low mental health reactivity to stressor exposure (low “stressor reactivity” [SR]), were reported during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. OBJECTIVE Extending these findings, we here examined prosp...

Facilitating the uptake and making better use of technological advances will be pivotal for counseling and clinical psychology to respond to the rising call for more community-based and person-centred care. While the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a structured self-report digital diary, could help facilitate this transition, it is currently uncl...

Introduction: Childhood adversity is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders and has especially been associated with an admixture of depressive, anxiety, and psychosis symptoms. Identity formation, a main developmental task during adolescence, may be impacted by these adverse experiences and act as an important process in the association bet...

Recent growth in digital technologies has enabled the recruitment and monitoring of large and diverse populations in remote health studies. However, the generalizability of inference drawn from remotely collected health data could be severely impacted by uneven participant engagement and attrition over the course of the study. We report findings on...

Background: Remote measurement technologies (RMTs) have the potential to revolutionize major depressive disorder (MDD) disease management by offering the ability to assess, monitor, and predict symptom changes. However, the promise of RMT data depends heavily on sustained user engagement over extended periods. In this paper, we report a longitudin...

Introduction: Childhood adversity may result in a negative expectation of future interactions with others, also referred to as ‘threat anticipation’. It may also negatively impact on identity development, which subsequently may influence how individuals deal with their environment. Here, we examine the hypotheses that 1) identity development is ass...

Introduction: Sleep quality is closely linked with mental health. Two factors that influence sleep are coping style and locus of control, yet these have not been investigated in daily life. In this study, we examined associations between coping styles and sleep quality in daily life and the potential mediating effect of daily locus of control in a...

BACKGROUND Major depressive disorder (MDD) affects millions of people worldwide, but timely treatment is not often received owing in part to inaccurate subjective recall and variability in the symptom course. Objective and frequent MDD monitoring can improve subjective recall and help to guide treatment selection. Attempts have been made, with vary...

Challenges exist for the analysis of mobile health data. These include: (i) maintaining participant engagement over extended time periods and therefore understanding what constitutes an acceptable threshold of missing data; (ii) distinguishing between the cross-sectional and longitudinal relationships for different features to determine their utili...

Typical measures of laboratory reactivity (i.e. difference between control and stress) and recovery (i.e. difference between stress and post-stress) were compared with a conventional measure of daily-life reactivity, best known as event-related stress. Fifty-three healthy individuals between 19 and 35 years of age took part in a laboratory session...

Background: Individuals with chronic psychosis consistently show impairment in emotion regulation (ER). However, little is known about how contextual appraisals shape ER strategy use in individuals in the early stages of psychosis. The present study investigates the extent to which different appraisal dimensions of the most negative and positive ev...

Exposure to Stressful Life Events (SLEs) has been linked to psychosis. However, the combined effect of SLEs and familial risk on subclinical psychotic symptoms over time remains unknown. The objective of the present study was to investigate the effect of SLEs on the level of subclinical psychotic symptoms in individuals with and without familial vu...

Background: Changes in lifestyle, finances and work status during COVID-19 lockdowns may have led to biopsychosocial changes in people with pre-existing vulnerabilities such as Major Depressive Disorders (MDDs) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Methods: Data were collected as a part of the RADAR-CNS (Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse-Central N...

Facilitating the uptake and making better use of technological advances will be pivotal for counseling and clinical psychology to respond to the rising call for more community-based and person-centered care. While the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), a structured self-report digital diary, could help facilitate this transition, it is currently unc...

Although the literature suggests trait-like differences in affective and cognitive vulnerabilities between individuals with and without a history of non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI), little is known about how these dispositional differences are experienced in the natural environment. In the present study, we compare the intensity, stability, interac...

Background Although non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is known typically to begin in adolescence, longitudinal information is lacking about patterns, predictors, and clinical outcomes of NSSI persistence among emerging adults. The present study was designed to (1) estimate NSSI persistence during the college period, (2) identify risk factors and high...

Background: Previous research suggests attachment is a vulnerability factor for self-harm thoughts and behaviors in adults. Yet, few studies have investigated this relationship during adolescence, although adolescence is a critical period for changes in attachment relationships and self-harm onset. Whether and how attachment relates to self-harm th...

Smartphone overuse can have detrimental impacts on youth mental health. How it may be longitudinally associated with depressive symptoms and functioning, and with daily momentary affect, remains to be investigated. A total of 3,033 young people were consecutively recruited from an ongoing large-scale epidemiological youth mental health study in Hon...

Influenced by the field of epidemiology and the early ecological psychologists, my research focused on the role of person-environment interactions in the development and maintenance of psychopathology – a field I would name Contextual Psychiatry. To capture the interaction between the person and the environment, I was one of the early adopters of t...

Background: Gait is an essential manifestation of depression. However, the gait characteristics of daily walking and their relationships with depression have yet to be fully explored. Objective: The aim of this study was to explore associations between depression symptom severity and daily-life gait characteristics derived from acceleration sign...

Objective The aim of this study is to investigate the time to affective recovery from daily-life stressors between healthy controls (HC) and two groups with an increased risk for developing depression: individuals with subclinical symptoms of depression (SSD), and individuals remitted from a depressive episode with residual symptoms of depression (...

Background Previous research has shown the relationship between loneliness and affect, as well as the relationship between trait loneliness and state loneliness. However, none has investigated how social context affects the association between loneliness and affect. The current study aims to examine the association between trait loneliness, state l...

Background and Objectives Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a progressive inflammatory and neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system affecting over 2.5 million people globally. In-clinic six-minute walk test (6MWT) is a widely used objective measure to evaluate the progression of MS. Yet, it has limitations such as the need for a clinical vi...

Since the introduction of the experience sampling method (ESM), there have been concerns that the repeated assessments typically related to this method may alter the behavior, thoughts, or feelings of participants. Previous studies have offered mixed results with some studies reporting reactive changes, while others failed to find such effects. Our...

Background: Previous research suggests attachment is a vulnerability factor for self-harm thoughts and behaviours in adults. Yet, few studies have investigated this relationship during adolescence, even though adolescence is a critical period for changes in attachment relationships, and self-harm onset. Whether and how attachment relates to self-ha...

Psychotic disorders are among the most burdensome mental health problems, requiring ongoing care and support. While the Experience sampling method (ESM), a structured self-monitoring technique, offers a promising approach to supporting person-centered care, there has been a general lack of user involvement in implementing these digital innovations...

Adolescent social withdrawal was drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As social withdrawal is crucial for adolescent development through its association with both positive and negative developmental outcomes, it is critical to understand how adolescents’ daily-life social withdrawal experiences changed as a result of the pandemic. Using t...

Within psychiatry, there is a need for more personalized and person-centered care. Whereas the focus has largely been on the search for biomarkers to advance the field, I will focus on the use of digital technology to further personalized care in psychiatry. I will discuss how using a structured diary applet could help in developing a much more fin...

Introduction Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is prevalent, often chronic, and requires ongoing monitoring of symptoms to track response to treatment and identify early indicators of relapse. Remote Measurement Technologies (RMT) provide an exciting opportunity to transform the measurement and management of MDD, via data collected from inbuilt smart...

Reduced positive future thinking has been associated with suicidal ideation and behavior in adults, and appears to be exacerbated by negative affect. Yet, this has received little attention in youth. Prior research has also focused on longer-term future thinking, e.g., months and years, and relied on lab-based assessments. Using the experience samp...

Childhood adversity is associated with psychopathology. First evidence in adults suggests that threat anticipation, i.e., an enhanced anticipation of unpleasant events creating an enduring sense of threat, may be a putative mechanism linking childhood adversity to psychopathology. This study aimed to test the indirect effect of childhood adversity...

Accurately recognizing health-related conditions from wearable data is crucial for improved healthcare outcomes. To improve the recognition accuracy, various approaches have focused on how to effectively fuse information from multiple sensors. Fusing multiple sensors is a common choice in many applications, but may not always be feasible in real-wo...

BACKGROUND Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a significant burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies of their treatment and prevention requires knowledge about risk and resilience. This multi-center study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psychological resilience in healthy, but vulnerabl...

Background Stress-related mental disorders are highly prevalent and pose a substantial burden on individuals and society. Improving strategies for the prevention and treatment of mental disorders requires a better understanding of their risk and resilience factors. This multicenter study aims to contribute to this endeavor by investigating psycholo...

Recently, cross-sectional relationships between psycho-social resilience factors (RFs) and resilience, operationalized as an outcome of low reactivity of mental health to stressor exposure (low ‘stressor reactivity’) during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, were reported. Extending these findings, we here examine prospective relationships an...

Restrictive COVID-19 measures can have significant mental health impacts, particularly on young people. How such measures may influence day-to-day momentary affect, nonetheless, remains to be explored. Experience sampling data were collected from 165 young people (aged 15-24) as part of a larger epidemiological youth mental health study in Hong Kon...

IntroductionChildhood adversity is a major risk factor for psychiatric disorders and has especially been associated with an admixture of depressive, anxiety and psychosis symptoms. Identity formation, a main developmental task during adolescence, may be impacted by these adverse experiences and act as an important process in the association between...

Background Changes in lifestyle, finances and work status during COVID-19 lockdowns may have led to biopsychosocial changes in people with pre-existing vulnerabilities such as Major Depressive Disorders (MDD) and Multiple Sclerosis (MS). Methods Data were collected as a part of the RADAR-CNS (Remote Assessment of Disease and Relapse – Central Nerv...

Contextual factors influence how people regulate their everyday emotions. While daily life is rich with situations that evoke emotion regulation, few studies have broadly investigated the role of context in regulating emotions in response to naturally occurring negative events. In this study, we use a structured diary technique - the Experience Sam...

Background Remote Measurement Technologies (RMTs) have the potential to revolutionise major depressive disorder (MDD) disease management by offering the ability to assess, monitor and predict symptom changes. However, the promise of RMT data depends heavily on sustained user engagement over extended periods of time. Here we report a longitudinal qu...

Social withdrawal is often presented as overall negative, with a focus on loneliness and peer exclusion. However, social withdrawal is also a part of normative adolescent development, which indicates that groups of adolescents potentially experience social withdrawal differently from one another. This study investigated whether different groups of...

Background Remote sensing for the measurement and management of long-term conditions such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is becoming more prevalent. User-engagement is essential to yield any benefits. We tested three hypotheses examining associations between clinical characteristics, perceptions of remote sensing, and objective user engagement...

Background: Adolescence is a period of both great social change, and of vulnerability to psychiatric distress. However, little is known about the associations between early psychopathology and social interactions at the fundamental level of daily life. To better understand the social correlates of subclinical psychopathology in adolescence, we ass...

Recent growth in remote studies has shown the effectiveness of digital health technologies in recruiting and monitoring the health and behavior of large and diverse populations of interest in real-world settings. However, retaining and engaging participants to monitor their long-term health trajectories has remained a significant challenge. Uneven...

Reduced positive future thinking has been associated with suicidal ideation and behaviour in adults, and appears to be exacerbated by negative affect. Yet, this has received little attention in youth. Prior research has also focussed on longer-term future thinking, e.g. months and years, and relied on lab-based assessments. Using the experience sam...

The Perceptual Crossing Experiment (PCE) captures the capacity for social contingency detection using real-time social interaction dynamics but has not been externally validated. We tested ecological and convergent validity of the PCE in a sample of 208 adolescents from the general population, aged 11 to 19 years. We expected associations between P...

Parents are known to provide a lasting basis for their children's social development. Understanding parent-driven socialization is particularly relevant in adolescence, as an increasing social independence is developed. However, the relationship between key parenting styles of care and control and the microlevel expression of daily-life social inte...

Introduction Emotional dysfunction and dysregulation are defining features of affective disorders. People differ in their beliefs about how controllable and useful negative and positive emotions are, and the process model of emotion regulation postulates that such beliefs play a central role in determining how people progress from emotion generatio...

Background Remote sensing for the measurement and management of long-term conditions such as Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is becoming more prevalent. User-engagement is essential to yield any benefits. We tested three hypotheses examining associations between clinical characteristics, perceptions of remote sensing, and objective user engagement...

Introduction/objective: This study aimed to investigate efficacy of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Daily Life (ACT-DL), combining face-to-face therapy with an Ecological Momentary Intervention (EMI), in addition to treatment as usual (TAU) for psychotic distress, in comparison to TAU. Methods: Individuals aged 15-65 years with clinically e...

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate the time to affective recovery from daily-life stressors between healthy controls (HC) and two groups with an increased risk for developing depression: individuals with subclinical symptoms of depression (SSD), and individuals remitted from a depressive episode with residual symptoms of depression...

Purpose Early detection and intervention of mental health problems in youth are topical given that mental disorders often start early in life. Young people with emerging mental disorders however, often present with non-specific, fluctuating symptoms. Recent reports indicate a decline in social functioning (SF) as an early sign of specific emerging...

BACKGROUND Identifying momentary risk and protective mechanisms may enhance our understanding and treatment of mental disorders. Affective stress reactivity is one mechanism that has been reported to be altered in individuals with early and later stages of mental disorder. Additionally, initial evidence suggests individuals with early and enduring...

Background Identifying momentary risk and protective mechanisms may enhance our understanding and treatment of mental disorders. Affective stress reactivity is one mechanism that has been reported to be altered in individuals with early and later stages of mental disorder. Additionally, initial evidence suggests individuals with early and enduring...