Oana Alexandra David

Babeș-Bolyai University | UBB · Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy

Online parenting programs to support parents of children with behavioral problems and emotional problems have become widely available in recent years. Research has consistently shown their positive effects on child development, parents’ adaptive parenting practices, and parents’ mental health. However, knowledge is lacking on which type of content...

Background Adolescents with a chronic medical condition (CMC) are often affected by mental health disorders coexisting with their physical conditions. Resilience-strengthening interventions can be beneficial for the adolescents’ mental health. However, evidence-based programs among this target group remain scarce. Here, we evaluated the wishes and...

Youth with a chronic medical condition (CMC) are often affected by comorbid mental disorders. Resilience-strengthening interventions can protect youth’s mental health, yet evidence-based programs remain scarce. To address this lack, this study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a dual approach combining app-based resilience training and cognitive...

Objective: College students have high rates of mental health problems and low rates of treatment. Although sociodemographic disparities in student mental health treatment seeking have been reported, findings have not been synthesized and quantified. The extent to which differences in perceived need for treatment contribute to overall disparities r...

Objective: Emotional problems in the youth population are a major issue that can have a significant negative impact for their future development as adults. Their emotion regulation (ER) abilities represent a preventive measure for those emotional problems. REThink is an online therapeutic game that was proved to be effective in rigorous studies, an...

Objective: Youth with a chronic medical condition (CMC) are often affected by comorbid mental disorders. Resilience-strengthening interventions can protect youth’s mental health, yet evidence-based programs remain scarce. To address this lack, this study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of a dual approach combining app-based resilience training an...

In an effort to explain the factors contributing to the development of student burnout, a construct that has received attention in relation to academic outcomes, including burnout, is emotion regulation. Further, attachment theory has been used to explore the variations in the use of particular emotion regulation strategies, and attachment has rece...

Background: Children and adolescents' help-seeking behaviors are often limited by fear, uncertainty, and stigma, as well as challenges with finding the right intervention, help, and a lack of familiarity with the process. A promising direction for the development of therapeutic interventions targeted at children is embedding them into gamified int...

Exposure to child maltreatment (CM) is considered to predispose children to devastating consequences in terms of mental health. Thus, it is a public health priority to provide these children with early preventive interventions that are accessible on a large scale, adapted to their needs, and effective in supporting their mental health. Here we repo...

Effectively responding to children’s noncompliance and/or temper tantrums can be challenging for parents. It is even more challenging in the context of parents’ own need to regulate their emotions. Recent reviews emphasized the role of parents’ emotion regulation abilities in children’s mental health. The present study aims to investigate two seque...

Background: Parenting interventions offer opportunities for reducing emotional problems in children and adolescents, based on addressing parental risk and protective factors. Online parenting interventions were developed more recently to increase access to interventions for parents, and the aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to inve...

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the best evidence-based form of psychotherapy for various types of psychopathology and life problems. In time, cognitive-behavioral theory has been adapted for other types of interventions, like counseling, mentoring, training, and lately coaching. Cognitive-behavioral coaching (CBC) is a specific approach to c...

Attentional bias towards positive stimuli is considered a resilience factor for mental health and well-being. The aim of the present study was to analyze the effects of an attentional bias training for positive faces in a preventive therapeutic game for children and adolescents. The sample of 54, which consisted of children and adolescents aged bet...

Background Emotional disorders are the most prevalent mental health conditions affecting children and adolescents. Thus, it becomes essential to develop and test early intervention strategies that are accessible and attractive as therapeutic strategies and can effectively improve youth's emotional and psychobiological reactivity to distress. Metho...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

Objective: College students` mental health is an international prioritized research subject. Dedicated interventions are constantly developed to be more suited, attractive, and effective and to reach as many students as possible. Our study aims to investigate the efficacy of an online game-based cognitive-behavioral therapy transdiagnostic interven...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

To improve the long-term results of psychological treatments, it is important to know why some people constantly have a healthy weight and others face difficulties in losing weight or maintaining it. This study aimed to identify psychological factors associated with maintaining or regaining weight loss and determine the psychological characteristic...

Emotional disorders are the most prevalent mental health conditions affecting children and adolescents. Thus, it becomes essential to develop and test early intervention strategies that are accessible, attractive, and can effectively improve their emotional functioning. A randomized control trial compared the prevention effects of the REThink thera...

The COVID-19 restrictions have impacted people’s lifestyles in all spheres (social, psychological, political, economic, and others). This study explored which factors affected the level of anxiety during the time of the first wave of COVID-19 and subsequent quarantine in a substantial proportion of 23 countries, included in this study. The data was...

Therapeutic or serious games are considered innovative ways of delivering psychological interventions especially suited for children and adolescents, which can have a positive impact on mental health, while also being fun and easily accessible online. While most serious games for children and adolescents address specific issues, such as anxiety or...

Test anxiety has a high prevalence in children and is associated with lower academic performance. The main purpose of the current paper was to investigate the efficacy of using technology based tools, in the form of a robotic agent and cartoons, for teaching school aged children functional cognitive reappraisal emotion-regulation strategies for man...

BACKGROUND Attentional bias towards positive stimuli is considered a resilience factor for mental health and well-being. OBJECTIVE Attentional bias towards positive stimuli is considered a resilience factor for mental health and well-being. The aim of the present study was to analyze the effects of an attentional bias training for positive faces i...

Recent meta-analyses show that psychological interventions have a small to medium effect on weight loss. We propose here a different approach to changing eating intentions. According to the Free Will literature, people decide to act before they acknowledge it, and they decide based on the reconstruction of previous experiences. The action can thus...

Objective: The aim of this article was to explore the effectiveness of rational emotive and cognitive-behavioral therapy (REBT) in a clinical setting. Methods: This study included 349 patients of the Albert Ellis Institute who sought psychotherapy from 2007 to 2016. Analyses were conducted by using the intent-to-treat principle, and outcomes wer...

The COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout the world, and concerns about psychological, social, and economic consequences are growing rapidly. Individuals’ empathy-based reactions towards others may be an important resilience factor in the face of COVID-19. Self-report data from 15,375 participants across 23 countries were collected from May to Au...

Prior and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have resulted in substantial changes to everyday life. The pandemic and measures of its control affect mental health negatively. Self-reported data from 15,375 participants from 23 countries were collected from May to August 2020 during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questionnaires me...

Prior and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have resulted in substantial changes to everyday life. The pandemic and measures of its control affect mental health negatively. Self-reported data from 15,375 participants from 23 countries were collected from May to August 2020 during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questionnaires me...

Prior and ongoing COVID-19 pandemic restrictions have resulted in substantial changes to everyday life. The pandemic and measures of its control affect mental health negatively. Self-reported data from 15,375 participants from 23 countries were collected from May to August 2020 during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questionnaires me...

Although evidence-based interventions exist, estimates suggest that about 60% percent of children and adolescents with mental health disorders do not receive the treatment they need. In this context, one expanding strategy for increasing access to mental health care for children and adolescents is the use therapeutic, or serious, games. REThink is...

Background and Objectives Recent approaches suggest that emotion regulation (ER) abilities represent potential predictors of emotional response among youths navigating stressful situations. To test this, we investigated whether ER abilities predicted the subjective and physiological emotional response experienced by youths during a stressful situat...

Background It is known that social anxiety disorder (SAD) interferes in a great deal of life areas, ranging from social and private relationships to work related environments. We aimed to investigate the comparative efficacy of three emotion-regulation strategies in a job interview task for individuals with SAD. We considered both different categor...

Background Children and adolescents are major computer and technology gadget users. While serious games hold important promises for promoting health-related behavioral change and mental health among children and adolescents, their efficacy is yet unclear.Objectives We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to offer a comprehensive pi...

Across the world, millions of couples get married each year. One of the strongest predictors of whether partners will remain in their relationship is their reported satisfaction. Marital satisfaction is commonly found to be a key predictor of both individual and relational well-being. Despite its importance in predicting relationship longevity, the...

Emotional disorders affect numerous children and adolescents worldwide; thus, developing accessible prevention tools to reduce associated burden in youths is of crucial importance. We conducted a randomized controlled study to examine the effects of the newly developed REThink therapeutic game on reducing the subjective emotional reactivity to a st...

Objectives To evaluate the efficacy of CBT in relation to weight loss and related psychological components and to analyze the relationship between alleged cognitive mechanisms of change and weight loss. Methods The studies we considered eligible were the randomized clinical trials which included and reported a quantitative assessment of change in...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

This chapter describes the contributions that Rational Emotive and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (REBT) has brought to the field of parent education. It presents the relevant concepts of REBT and how they apply to parenting and specific difficulties of parents. Existing REBT parent education curricula are described together with research. Finally, r...

One to five of the adult working population was found to present some type of mental health problem at any given time, with documented impact of their employability, employee performance and quality of life. Irrational and rational cognitions/beliefs represent evaluative cognitive structures, consistently associated with distress and psychopatholog...

In the present study, we investigated the effects of a cosmetic cream with a rose based formula scent on mood, in a sample of 26 female participants, with a mean age of 27.42 years of age. We looked at psychological measures (e.g., mood‐based self‐reports scales) and brain‐related correlates (e.g., brain activation patterns) of stress/relaxation in...

Background: Although numerous mental health apps are commercially available, only a few of them have been empirically tested. PsyPills is an interactive and personalized mobile application, based on emotion regulation research and Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy principles, that can function as a stand-alone intervention aimed at offering immedia...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Albert Ellis pioneered the application of cognitive methods in parent education programs in the mid-1950s. Albert Ellis was interested in applying Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) with children, by working directly with children, or indirectly, by working with parents (Bernard, Ellis, & Terjesen, 2006). From the early 1960s with the publica...

While initially used in the sports field, coaching is currently considered a domain at the intersection of various disciplines (e.g., andragogy, psychology, behavioral sciences, consulting), which is defined by different theories (e.g., adult learning theories, counseling, psychotherapeutic approaches, and positive psychology). Coaching is primaril...

The strength of sexual selection on secondary sexual traits varies depending on prevailing economic and ecological conditions. In humans, cross-cultural evidence suggests women’s preferences for men’s testosterone dependent masculine facial traits are stronger under conditions where health is compromised, male mortality rates are higher and economi...

The mechanisms of change are rarely investigated in the field of gamified interventions for preventing emotional disorders in children and adolescents despite the wide recognition for the advantages they offer as prevention tool. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the mechanisms of change of a therapeutic game (REThink), spe...

Therapeutic games represent a promising solution for addressing emotional difficulties in youths. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effectiveness of the REThink game, in helping children and adolescents, to develop psychological resilience. Therefore, 165 children aged between 10 and 16 years were randomly assigned in one of the t...

Olfaction plays an important role in human social communication, including multiple domains in which people often rely on their sense of smell in the social context. The importance of the sense of smell and its role can however vary inter-individually and culturally. Despite the growing body of literature on differences in olfactory performance or...

Assessment is considered important in RE-CBC not only in the initial phase of coaching but also during the coaching process and at its termination, depending on its function. A comprehensive assessment provides an empirical basis for the case conceptualization and subsequent intervention using specific frameworks. During the coaching process, asses...

Nowadays managers are not only expected to function exceptionally in managing their organizations, they are also expected to excel in an increasingly competitive and demanding work context and use all the resources available to them. There are thus increasing expectations from managers regarding the roles that they need to endorse, besides the mana...

This chapter focuses on evidence-based, positive parenting practices and contributions of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT; Ellis, 1962) to the practice of parenting coaching. The process of parenting coaching is focused on the present, with the aim of promoting child and parent adjustment, and makes use of RE-CB coaching techniques to help...

The increasing interest in the use of technology in coaching is rooted in the large-scale availability of technical capabilities, rapid technological advancement, and the multiple advantages associated with the new technological developments. For example, in 2016 almost half of the global population had access to internet, with “millennial” interne...

Coaching continues to grow both as a professional occupation as well as a domain using a group of techniques for supporting people to achieve specific goals in various areas of their lives (life, leadership, work performance, career, health, parenting, sports). It is considered a personalized and systematic learning process dealing with non-clinica...

Introduction: Children and adolescents’ ability to effectively identify and understand emotions is an important aspect of development that has been linked to a variety of beneficial outcomes (e.g., better mental health, social skills and academic performance; Sprung, Münch, Harris, Ebesutani, & Hofmann, 2015). According to the binary model of distr...

This eminently useful guide presents an up-to-date framework for Rational-Emotive Cognitive-Behavioral Coaching (RE-CBC), from basic concepts, techniques, and applications to evidence of how and why this versatile method works. It details how RE-CBC synthesizes the rational thinking, cognitive disputing, and semantic training traditions of RE and C...

This study assessed the factor structure and psychometric properties of the Parent Anger Scale in a sample of 326 parents of children ages 2–18 years.Exploratory factor analysis identified a two-factor solution: parent anger experience and parent anger expression. Subscales based on the items of each factor demonstrated excellent internal consistenc...

[This corrects the article on p. 1199 in vol. 8, PMID: 28785230.].

Forms of committed relationships, including formal marriage arrangements between men and women, exist in almost every culture (Bell, 1997). Yet, similarly to many other psychological constructs (Henrich et al., 2010), marital satisfaction and its correlates have been investigated almost exclusively in Western countries (eg, Bradbury et al., 2000)....

Parenting programs are currently treatment of choice for behavioral disorders in children and one of their main components is reducing the negativity bias in the child–parent dyad. The Rational Positive Parenting Program (rPPP) is a program with a special focus on parent emotion-regulation functional reappraisal strategies, which has recently recei...

Human spatial behavior has been the focus of hundreds of previous research studies. However, the conclusions and generalizability of previous studies on interpersonal distance preferences were limited by some important methodological and sampling issues. The objective of the present study was to compare preferred interpersonal distances across the...

Managerial coaching is currently seen as an effective leadership practice facilitating learning process of the employees for performing better and being more effective in organizations. This article builds on recent research on the importance of the managerial coaching by empirically investigating the effects of a cognitive-behavioral coaching prog...

Flight anxiety and the fear-related avoidance draw serious personal and financial negative consequences. Although classical exposure techniques for flight anxiety are widely used, they involve significant limits. Efforts to develop the benefits and access to evidence-based psychotherapies have led to a new method of delivering exposure technique, n...

Children and adolescents’ ability to effectively understand their own emotions is an important aspect of their development, related with a variety of beneficial outcomes (e.g. better mental health, social skills, and academic performance). Although there are effective programs for developing emotional skills of young people, their implementation is...

Introduction: Rational and irrational beliefs (RBs/IBs) are key constructs that underlie coaching interventions aimed to promote better emotion regulation, respectively decrease emotional difficulties, within a Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy/Coaching (REBT/REBC) framework. In this context, coaching children and adolescents’ skills for identifyin...

The role of distorted cognitions in human functioning/adaptation is well-established at the individual level. We argue that the discrepancy between perceived national character and the actual national character (i.e., personality traits) is a form of distorted cognition at the group/country level and thus could have a negative impact on the functio...