Pierre Philippot

Catholic University of Louvain | UCLouvain · Psychological Sciences Research Institute

Paying attention to body sensations has been associated with many positive outcomes such as increased subjective well-being, enhanced emotion regulation, and reduced symptom reports. Furthermore, body awareness has an important therapeutic utility in the treatment of various psychological ailments. Despite its importance in mental health, there is...

Background: While the link between trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and hypertension is established, its underlying mechanisms remain underexplored. Objective: This study tested a theoretical model exploring the moderating influence of psychological (emotion regulation) and interpersonal (social support) factors on the mediation betwe...

Negative repetitive thinking (i.e., rumination and worries) is a central process in depression and anxiety. It has been suggested that different cognitive modes in repetitive thinking (RT) (e.g., abstract-evaluative versus concrete-experiential) determine whether RT consequences are constructive or unconstructive. Three studies were conducted in or...

Inhibitory retrieval has redefined the way that exposure therapy can help individuals cope with debilitative states of fear and anxiety. Here we propose that an inhibitory retrieval-based model of exposure therapy could also be applied to the context of sport competition. We first discuss the usefulness of applying inhibitory retrieval-based exposu...

Background As cognitive functions and, more specifically, executive functions (EF) seem to influence autonomy among the elderly, we investigated the role of each of the five EF sub-components (inhibition, spontaneous flexibility, reactive flexibility, planning, and updating in working memory) for the risk of functional decline. Method A total of 1...

Background Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, some psychotherapists had to propose remote consultations, i.e., teleconsultation. While some evidence suggests positive outcomes from teleconsultation, professionals still hold negative beliefs towards it. Additionally, no rigorous and integrative practice framework for teleconsultation has yet been develop...

Body awareness (BA) has long been proposed as a working mechanism of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs), yet research on the mediating role of BA is scarce. Hence, the present study assesses the impact of an 8-week MBI on self-reported and indirect measures of BA, investigates the potential mediating role of BA in the relationship between an MB...

This study investigates how asymmetry, expressed emotion, and sex of the expresser impact the perception of emotional facial expressions (EFEs) in terms of perceived genuineness. Thirty-five undergraduate women completed a task using chimeric stimuli with artificial human faces. They were required to judge whether the expressed emotion was genuinel...

Objectives Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) are widely used with adults and children to treat anxiety and depressive symptomatology. However, only few studies with a rigorous design have been conducted among adolescents with behavior disorders even though this population suffers from symptoms that can be addressed by MBIs such as inattention...

Despite the large-scale dissemination of mindfulness-based interventions, debates persist about the very nature of mindfulness. To date, one of the dominant views is the five-facet approach, which suggests that mindfulness includes five facets (i.e., Observing, Describing, Nonjudging, Nonreactivity, and Acting with Awareness). However, uncertainty...

Despite the large-scale dissemination of mindfulness-based interventions, debates persist about the very nature of mindfulness. To date, one of the dominant views is the five-facet approach, which suggests that mindfulness includes five facets (i.e., Observing, Describing, Nonjudging, Nonreactivity, and Acting with Awareness). However, uncertainty...

Several studies have shown that mindfulness-based programs (MBPs) may bring promising benefits for youth. However, little is known about its efficacy in specific clinical populations and even less about the psychological processes that underlie the changes. This study investigates the efficacy of a MBP among a population of adolescent boys with beh...

Introduction A large number of studies have been devoted to the development of mindfulness questionnaires, a potential central mechanism in therapy. Although these questionnaires are well validated for adults, their accessibility to young populations are still in its infancy. Objective This study aims to validate a French version of the Child and...

Perfectionism is a phenomenon that is gaining an increasing interest among researchers and health practitioners. However, no consensus currently exists concerning its definition, and there is still a lack of experimental and longitudinal studies. The purpose of this article is to shed light on this phenomenon using a process-based approach. As a fi...

Background: Within the heterogeneity of schizophrenia, apathy constitutes an independent cluster of negative symptoms associated with poor outcomes. Attempts to identify an emotional deficit in patients who have schizophrenia with negative symptoms have yielded mixed results, and studies that focus on the relationship between apathy and emotional d...

Background: Within the heterogeneity of schizophrenia, apathy constitutes an independent cluster of negative symptoms associated with poor outcomes. Attempts to identify an emotional deficit in patients who have schizophrenia with negative symptoms have yielded mixed results, and studies that focus on the relationship between apathy and emotional...

This article presents the theoretical, clinical, and practical arguments supporting a process‐based transdiagnostic approach to psychotherapy. A working definition of “psychological process” is provided, as well as a tri‐dimensional categorization of psychological processes potentially involved in psychopathology. Guidelines are proposed to select...

Introduction: Self-discrepancies (the distances between the perceived self and the ideal or the socially prescribed selves) are a hallmark in psychological distress. However, a clinical tool evaluating these discrepancies is lacking. Objective: To investigate the validity, the psychometric characteristics and the clinical relevance of the Self-Disc...

Objective: Repetitive thoughts can be divided in two modes: abstract/analytic (decontextualized and dysfunctional) and concrete/experiential (problem-focused and adaptive). They constitute a transdiagnostic process involved in many psychopathological states but have received little attention in schizophrenia, as earlier studies only indexed increas...

Cognitive models of psychopathology posit that metacognitive beliefs may figure prominently in the maintenance, and perhaps the etiology, of emotional disorders. Wells and Cartwright-Hatton (2004) developed the 30-item Metacognitions Questionnaire (MCQ-30) to measure metacognitive beliefs among individuals with anxiety and depression. However, unce...

Background and objectives: Social anxiety (SA) is associated with a tendency to interpret social information in a more threatening manner. Most of the research in SA has focused on unimodal exploration (mostly based on facial expressions), thus neglecting the ubiquity of cross-modality. To fill this gap, the present study sought to explore whether...

This study examines the impact of partial distractor valence and schematicity (i.e., their relation to fear representation) on exposure efficacy. One hundred forty-one spider phobics were exposed to spider pictures and asked, in a between-subjects experimental design, to form mental images of words that were fear related (to spiders) and negative (...

Cognitive models posit that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with and maintained by attentional bias (AB) for social threat. However, over the last years, it has been suggested that AB in SAD may result from a decreased activation of the left prefrontal cortex, and particularly of its dorsolateral part (dlPFC). Accordingly, a transient i...

Cognitive models posit that social anxiety disorder (SAD) is maintained by biased information-processing vis-à-vis threat of social exclusion. However, uncertainty still abounds regarding the very nature of this sensitivity to social exclusion in SAD. Especially, brain alterations related to social exclusion have not been explored in SAD. Our prima...

Social-rank cues communicate social status or social power within and between groups. Information about social-rank is fluently processed in both visual and auditory modalities. So far, the investigation on the processing of social-rank cues has been limited to studies in which information from a single modality was assessed or manipulated. Yet, in...

The majority of evidence on social anxiety (SA)-linked attentional biases to threat comes from research using facial expressions. Emotions are, however, communicated through other channels, such as voice. Despite its importance in the interpretation of social cues, emotional prosody processing in SA has been barely explored. This study investigated...

Emotion dysregulation is strongly implicated in the development of psychological problems during adolescence. The purpose of this study was to examine the feasibility and acceptability of an intervention for enhancing self-regulation of emotion in adolescents, adapted from Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy. We studied the impact of the interventi...

Background: Emotional and interpersonal deficits play a crucial role in alcohol related disorders as they predict alcohol consumption and relapse. Recent models of emotion regulation in psychopathology postulate that these deficits are centrally related to increased abstract/analytic repetitive thinking, combined with reduced concrete/experiential...

Objectives: Previous findings and the depressive-executive dysfunction hypothesis suggest that the established association between executive functioning and depression is accounted for by repetitive thinking. Investigating the association between executive functioning, repetitive thinking, and depressive mood, the present study empirically tested t...

L’interoception, correspondant a la capacite de prendre conscience des sensations corporelles (SC) et reponses physiologiques, est supposee jouer un role majeur dans l’emergence de la reponse anxieuse. Chez les adultes, differentes etudes ont montre une alteration des processus interoceptifs en lien avec l’anxiete, qui s’associe a une sensibilite i...

This chapter examines the care and provision of mental health services to patients with mental and psychological issues within the hospital systems in Rwanda. The chapter traces also the effect of the 1994 genocide on the population and discusses the various strategies, national policies, programs and services put in place to deal effectively with...

Subthalamic nucleus (STN) deep brain stimulation (DBS) has recently advanced our understanding of the major role played by this basal ganglion in human emotion. Research indicates that STN DBS can induce modifications in all components of emotion, and neuroimaging studies have shown that the metabolic modifications correlated with these emotional d...

Background This paper is a commentary to the article entitled: “Are we overpathologizing everyday life? A tenable blueprint for behavioral addiction research”, by Billieux, Schimmenti, Khazaal, Maurage and Heeren (2015). Methods and Aims In this manuscript, we commented on two aspects developed by the authors. Billieux et al. (2015) propose that t...

The particularly high treatment gap in alcohol-dependence suggests the existence of important barriers to treatment decision and in particular difficulties in problem recognition. This study tested the relation between problem recognition and self-related memories. Forty-one recently detoxified alcohol-dependent individuals (AD) were compared to tw...

Background: A specific sense of self and sensitivity to self-threatening situations among alcohol-dependent (AD) individuals has often been reported by clinicians. Unpleasant self-awareness of situations of personal failure may lead to relapse, especially for AD individuals with high self-consciousness. However, the implication of Higgins’ self-dis...

A commentary on Advancing understanding of executive function impairments and psychopathology: Bridging the gap between clinical and cognitive approaches by Snyder, H.R., Miyake, A., & Hankin, B. L. (2015). Frontiers in Psychology, 6:328. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00328”

Cet article présente l’application à un cas clinique de la procédure d’évaluation des processus pour les troubles anxiodépressifs développée dans l’article de Philippot et al., 2015 (dans ce numéro). Sept classes de processus ont été identifiées par questionnaire chez Marie, une jeune femme de 28 ans souffrant d’une anxiété importante de ne pas pou...

L’approche processuelle transdiagnostique a été conçue pour pallier les limites des protocoles de traitement empiriquement validés pour un diagnostic et régulièrement utilisés en thérapie comportementale et cognitive. Dans cet article, nous avons présenté une nouvelle manière de concevoir les thérapies : une approche modulaire et processuelle. Son...

Disturbed processing of emotional faces and voices is typically observed in schizophrenia. This deficit leads to impaired social cognition and interactions. In this study, we investigated whether impaired processing of emotions also affects musical stimuli, which are widely present in daily life and known for their emotional impact. Thirty schizoph...

Over the last years, mindfulness-based interventions combined with habit reversal training have been demonstrated to be particularly suitable for addressing trichotillomania. However, since these studies always combined mindfulness training to habit reversal without including either a mindfulness or habit reversal condition alone, it is still uncle...

Dysfunctional use of the mobile phone has often been conceptualized as a 'behavioural addiction' that shares most features with drug addictions. In the current article, we challenge the clinical utility of the addiction model as applied to mobile phone overuse. We describe the case of a woman who overuses her mobile phone from two distinct approach...

The chronic pain-bio-psycho-social phenomenon would index a transition between a pain alarm and a pain disease, with reshaping of the inhibitive brain areas and a takeover of psychological factors on the modulatory systems. The current treatment of elders' chronic pain suffers from many limits, and this article addresses this issue by discussing a...

Mindfulness training improves mental health and psychological functioning. Although several questionnaires have been developed to measure mindfulness, the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) is currently one of the most widely used scales. However, uncertainty remains about whether the effects of mindfulness training can be unambiguously at...

Models of anxiety disorders posit that information processing biases towards threat may result from an imbalance between top-down attentional control processes and bottom-up attentional processes, such that anxiety could reduce the influence of the former and increase the influence of the latter. However, researchers have recently pointed to limita...

People with anxiety disorders show an attentional bias for threat (AB), and Attention Bias Modification (ABM) procedures have been found to reduce this bias. However, the underlying processes accounting for this effect remain poorly understood. One explanation suggests that ABM requires the modification of attention control, driven by the recruitme...

Research has provided controversial results regarding the role of distraction (vs. attentional focus) during exposure therapy. In the present study, we manipulated the nature of the concepts activated during exposure. Sixty-six spider phobics were exposed to pictures of spiders and asked, or not, to form mental images of concepts that were either r...

Purpose: Tinnitus is the perception of a sound in the absence of external stimulus. Currently, the pathophysiology of tinnitus is not fully understood, but recent studies indicate that alterations in the brain involve non-auditory areas, including the prefrontal cortex. Here, we hypothesize that these brain alterations affect top-down cognitive co...

Studies that have carried out experimental evaluation of emotional skills in alcohol-dependence have, up to now, been mainly focused on the exploration of emotional facial expressions (EFE) decoding. In the present paper, we provide some complements to the recent systematic literature review published by Donadon and de Lima Osório on this crucial t...

Background The current study examined the psychometric properties of the 12-item French-language version of the Questionnaire on Smoking Urges (QSU-12), a widely used multidimensional measure of cigarette craving. Methods Daily smokers (n=230) completed the QSU-12, the Fägerstrom Test for Nicotine Dependence, and items about addiction-related symp...

The excessive fear of being negatively evaluated constitutes a central component of social anxiety (SA). Models posit that selective attention to threat and biased interpretations of ambiguous stimuli contribute to the maintenance of this psychopathology. There is strong support for the existence of processing biases but most of the available evide...

This article presents the adaptation and the validation of a short self-report questionnaire assessing repetitive thinking, the Mini Cambridge-Exeter Repetitive Thought Scale (Mini-CERTS). This 16 item scale evaluates two dimensions of repetitive thinking: “concrete, experiential thinking” (CET) and “abstract, analytical thinking” (AAT) that may ha...

This article presents the adaptation and the validation of a short self-report questionnaire assessing repetitive thinking, the Mini Cambridge-Exeter Repetitive Thought Scale (Mini-CERTS). This 16 item scale evaluates two dimensions of repetitive thinking: “concrete, experiential thinking” (CET) and “abstract, analytical thinking” (AAT) that may ha...

Clark and Wells' (1995) model of social phobia proposes that there are 3 types of maladaptive self-beliefs responsible for social anxiety (high standard, conditional, and unconditional beliefs). Wong and Moulds (2009) recently developed the 15-item Self-Beliefs Social Anxiety (SBSA) scale that measures the strength of the self-belief types proposed...

Over the last 30years, researchers have disagreed over the consequences of diverting attention from threat for exposure efficacy, which is an important theoretical and clinical debate. Therefore, the present meta-analysis assessed the efficacy of attentionally focused exposure against distracted and attentionally uninstructed exposure regarding dis...

Social anxiety is characterized by fear of evaluative interpersonal situations. Many studies have investigated the perception of emotional faces in socially anxious individuals and have reported biases in the processing of threatening faces. However, faces are not the only stimuli carrying an interpersonal evaluative load. The present study investi...

D. Hermans, B. Rime, & B. Mesquita (Eds.). Changing Emotion, New-York: Psychology Press. Psychology Press

Background. Peripheral cytokines are related to cognitive impairment in delirium and dementia. During alcohol detoxification, elevation of pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines is reported. However, the relationship between peripheral cytokines and cognitive function in alcohol dependence has not been examined. We characterised the serum cytokine pr...

Individuals with depressive symptoms tend to adopt an abstract-analytical (A-A) rather than a concrete-experiential (C-E) mode of rumination. A large body of evidence shows that this leads to many deficits that are associated with depression (Watkins in Psychol Bull 134:163–206, 2008). In two studies, the present research examined whether indecisio...

This paper analyses some of the key issues raised across the eight contributions of the present special issue. First, the remarkable ubiquity of emotion regulation (ER) problems throughout psychopathology will be stressed, and the merits of relying on emotion science to further our understanding of psychopathology will be discussed. Then, the statu...

Numerous studies have shown an exacerbation of attentional bias towards threat in anxiety states. However, the cognitive mechanisms responsible for these attentional biases remain largely unknown. Further, the authors outline the need to consider the nature of the attentional processes in operation (hypervigilance, avoidance, or disengagement). We...

L'alcoolo-dépendance est le trouble mental le plus répandu. Elle a des répercussions importantes sur les plans psychologique, physiologique, économique et social. La prise en charge de ce trouble demeure cependant peu efficace, avec un taux de rechute de 75 % durant les six mois post-traitement. Dévelop-per et valider de nouvelles interventions psy...