Inez Myin-Germeys

KU Leuven | ku leuven · Department of Neurosciences

ACT in Daily Life (ACT-DL) is a blended-care Ecological Momentary Intervention that extends ACT into the daily life of individuals, improving psychotic distress, negative symptoms, and global functioning. However, it remains unclear whether ACT-DL works equally for everyone. We investigated whether moderators (i.e., sociodemographic information, pe...

Background A significant proportion of mental health care professionals (MHCPs) hold stigmatizing attitudes about their patients. When patients perceive and internalize these beliefs, self-stigmatization can increase. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) may decrease stigmatizing attitudes by changing the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ thinking into continu...

Purpose During emotional events, people monitor the effectiveness of their emotion regulation (ER) to decide whether to keep using their current ER strategy, switch to a new strategy, or stop the regulation process. However, there is little empirical research on the monitoring phase of ER, particularly on which and how situational and individual fa...

BACKGROUND Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) and Interventions (EMI), commonly delivered via smartphones, hold the potential to bridge the gap between therapy sessions and the daily life of individuals experiencing early psychotic symptoms. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Daily Life (ACT-DL) combines 8 face-to-face ACT sessions with the u...

Stress‐sensitivity (SS) is considered a psychobiological trait possibly resulting from the interaction of genetic and environmental factors (GxE). This study examined whether the interaction of SS‐related genetic markers with interview‐based dimensions of childhood adversity predicted longitudinal trajectories of low versus high SS. Participants we...

Introduction: Although Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) demonstrates clinical utility, its benefits and challenges for treatment-seeking individuals who engage in Non-Suicidal Self-Injury (NSSI) are not well understood. This study evaluates self-reported benefits (i.e. increases in self-insight and self-efficacy) and challenges of EMA (i.e., b...

Migration has been associated with both adverse and potentially beneficial mental health outcomes, with varying impacts on adolescents. With great flux in European migrations streams, an update is required of its effects on adolescent mental health. This systematic review provides an overview of the relationship between migration background (first,...

Background Research suggests that most mental health conditions have their onset in the critically social period of adolescence. Yet, we lack understanding of the potential social processes underlying early psychopathological development. We propose a conceptual model where daily-life social interactions and social skills form an intermediate link...

Some ethical committees question whether individuals with a history of self-harm thoughts and behaviours (SHTBs) are “too vulnerable” to take part in Experience Sampling Method (ESM) research and if repeatedly asking about SHTBs could be harmful. Past research has focused on whether participating in ESM research influences SHTBs, and has overlooked...

Background and Hypothesis Sex differences in psychosis are reported across the psychosis spectrum, including in subclinical stages. An important factor in understanding these variations is the subjective experience of everyday social interactions (SI). We investigated whether the presence of psychotic experiences (PEs), as well as associated distre...

Importance The field of public mental health is evolving to tackle the profound impact of global challenges such as climate change, migration, and health crises. These issues accentuate health and social inequities, necessitating a focus on how to achieve interventions that are equitable and enhance mental health across all societal strata. Observ...

Numerous studies have substantiated the efficacy of slow-paced breathing (SPB) in decreasing anxiety and increasing vagally-mediated heart rate variability (HRV). Given its effectiveness and simplicity, SPB is a promising candidate for a just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI). This study examined the efficacy of SPB, triggered by increased anxi...

Importance A major portion of adolescents and adults seeking psychiatric treatment report nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) within the past month, yet the short-term course of NSSI among these patients remains poorly understood. Objective To advance the understanding of the short-term course of NSSI cognitions (ie, thoughts, urges, and self-efficacy...

BACKGROUND: Actively engaging clients in managing their health and care is crucial for person-centered mental healthcare. Self-monitoring tools such as the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) can help individuals collect information about their mental health and daily activities on their smartphones and share this with their clinicians.AIMS: This qual...

This position paper by the international IMMERSE consortium reviews the evidence of a digital mental health solution based on Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM) for advancing person-centered mental health care and outlines a research agenda for implementing innovative digital mental health tools into routine clinical practice. ESM is a structure...

Background: Stress-related disorders present a significant global burden. There is great need for effective, preventive measures. Mobile just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAI) have the potential to be applied in real time and context-specifically, precisely when individuals need them most. However, they have not been widely implemented in the...

Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic is assumed to have had a large impact on the mental health of adolescents. Finding out for which youth the mental health impact was largest is imperative for strengthening future crisis responses. In this study, we aimed to assess the impact of the pandemic on the mental health of different sociodemographic groups of...

Purpose During emotional events, people monitor the effectiveness of their emotion regulation (ER) to decide whether to keep using their current ER strategy, switch to a new strategy, or stop the regulation process. However, there is little empirical research on the monitoring phase of ER, particularly on what and how situational and individual fac...

Laboratory stress tasks are necessary to closely investigate the stress response in a controlled environment. However, to our knowledge, no study has tested whether participating in such tasks can pose any daily life adverse effect. Fifty-three healthy participants (46 women) took part in a laboratory session where stress was induced using a typica...

When using the experience sampling method (ESM), researchers must navigate a delicate balance between obtaining fine-grained snapshots of phenomena of interest and avoiding undue respondent burden, which can lead to disengagement and compromise data quality. To guide that process, we investigated how questionnaire length and sampling frequency impa...

Background Previous mobile health (mHealth) studies have revealed significant links between depression and circadian rhythm features measured via wearables. However, the comprehensive impact of seasonal variations was not fully considered in these studies, potentially biasing interpretations in real-world settings. Objective This study aims to exp...

Background Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of digital tools for delivering person-centred mental health care. Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), a structured diary technique for capturing moment-to-moment variation in experience and behaviour in service users’ daily life, reflects a particularly promising avenue for impleme...

Research increasingly highlights the importance of social disconnectedness for the development of psychosis. However, the perspective of individuals with psychosis remains largely underexplored. At present, there is also no comprehensive view of the role of social processes throughout different phases of psychosis development. The current study aim...

Introduction: Childhood adversity is known to predispose to a wide array of psychopathology in adolescence and early adulthood. Identity development, being a crucial developmental task during adolescence, has been suggested to affect this association. Nonetheless, research on the role of identity processes is scarce. The current study aims to inves...

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is increasingly used by researchers from various disciplines to answer novel questions about individuals’ daily lives. Measurement best practices have long been overlooked in ESM research, and recent reviews show that item quality is often not reported in ESM studies. The absence of information about item qualit...

Anhedonia is a lack or loss of pleasure in daily life and is common across many mental health disorders (i.e., transdiagnostic). This is the first systematic review to investigate: 1) How is anhedonia conceptualized and explicitly measured using experience sampling methodology (ESM) in psychiatry and mental health?; 2) What is the experience of anh...

Background Given the rapid expansion of research into digital health interventions (DHIs) for severe mental illness (SMI; eg, schizophrenia and other psychosis diagnoses), there is an emergent need for clear safety measures. Currently, measurement and reporting of adverse events (AEs) are inconsistent across studies. Therefore, an international net...

Background Adolescent solitude was drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As solitude is crucial for adolescent development through its association with both positive and negative developmental outcomes, it is critical to understand how adolescents’ daily-life solitary experiences changed as a result of the pandemic. Methods Using three wa...

Background Recent years have seen a growing interest in the use of digital tools for delivering person-centred mental health care. Experience Sampling Methodology (ESM), a structured diary technique for capturing moment-to-moment variation in experience and behaviour in service users’ daily life, reflects a particularly promising avenue for impleme...

INTRODUCTION: Digital self-monitoring tools, such as the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), enable individuals to collect detailed information about their mental health and daily life context and may help guide and support person-centered mental health care. However, like many digital interventions, ESM struggles to move from research to clinical in...

Background and Hypotheses Affective recovery, operationalized as the time needed for affect to return to baseline levels after daily stressors, may be a putative momentary representation of resilience. This study aimed to investigate affective recovery in positive and negative affect across subclinical and clinical stages of psychosis and whether t...

Aim 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 synthesis is associated wit...

Background While evidence shows that people with early psychosis are flexible in using different emotion regulation (ER) strategies to manage the varying contextual demands, no studies have examined the effectiveness of such regulatory flexibility in this population. We addressed this issue by investigating whether and how ER flexibility relate to...

BACKGROUND Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is promising in the treatment of early psychosis. Augmenting face-to-face ACT with a mobile health (mHealth) ecological momentary intervention (EMI) may increase its treatment effects and empower clients to take treatment into their own hands. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate treatment en...

Background Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is promising in the treatment of early psychosis. Augmenting face-to-face ACT with mobile health ecological momentary interventions may increase its treatment effects and empower clients to take treatment into their own hands. Objective This study aimed to investigate and predict treatment engagem...

This pilot study aimed to test a comprehensive experience sampling method (ESM) protocol for investigating the relationship between stress and personality functioning (PF) in the daily lives of outpatients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). Participants (N = 22) responded to a 32-item ESM questionnaire 10 times a day for 1 week w...

Background Psychotic experiences (PEs) and social isolation (SI) seem related during early stages of psychosis, but the temporal dynamics between the two are not clear. Literature so far suggests a self-perpetuating cycle wherein momentary increases in PEs lead to social withdrawal, which, subsequently, triggers PEs at a next point in time, especia...

BACKGROUND Disturbances in wearable-measured circadian rhythms have been linked with depression severity. However, the real-world associations between circadian rhythms and depression may be biased if seasonal effects are not appropriately considered. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to explore the associations between depression severity and wearable-m...

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: Self-harm is a leading cause of death and injury worldwide and is especially common amongst adolescents. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are a risk factor for self-harm within the Integrated-Motivational Volitional (IMV) model. However, it remains unclear whether ACEs are associated with lifetime self-harm thoughts, behaviours, or...

Adolescence is a critical period for self-harm thoughts and behaviours (SHTBs) and loneliness is an important risk factor. However, no research has investigated how loneliness is associated with adolescent SHTBs in real time and whether this association is influenced by parent-child attachment relationships, which correlate with both loneliness 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...

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 betwe...

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...