Reinout W Wiers

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Psychology

Background: Alcohol-dependent individuals tend to selectively approach alcohol cues in the environment, demonstrating an alcohol approach bias. Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) training can reduce the approach bias and decrease relapse rates in alcohol-dependent patients when added to abstinence-focused treatment. It has therefore become part of...

This study examined how top-down control influenced letter-speech sound (L-SS) learning, the initial phase of learning to read. In 2020, 107 Dutch children (53 boys, Mage = 106.845 months) learned eight L-SS correspondences, either preceded by goal-directed or implicit instructions. Symbol knowledge and artificial word-reading ability were assessed...

Background: Loneliness and social isolation are known to be associated with depression, general anxiety, and social anxiety. However, knowledge on the overlapping and unique features of these relationships, while differentiating between social loneliness (perceived absence of an acceptable social network) and emotional loneliness (perceived absenc...

BACKGROUND Interpretation Bias Modification (IBM) and Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) cognitive re-training interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments for improving social anxiety or alcohol use problems. However, previous trials have not examined the combination of these interventions among a young, comorbid sample. OBJECTIVE This s...

Early adolescence is an important transition period during which many mental disorders emerge. The interplay between different internalizing and externalizing mental health problems in adolescence is poorly understood at the within-person level. Executive functioning (EF) in early adolescence has been shown to constitute a transdiagnostic risk fact...

Student burnout is raising an increasing amount of concern. Burnout often leads to psychosocial problems and drop-out. In this study multiple regression analysis was used to examine the impact of performance pressure, loneliness, and sense of belonging on the underlying dimensions of burnout in 3,134 university students in the Netherlands. Results...

Introduction Conversational agents (computer programs that use artificial intelligence to simulate a conversation with users through natural language) have evolved considerably in recent years to support healthcare by providing autonomous, interactive, and accessible services, making them potentially useful for supporting smoking cessation. We perf...

Background While cannabis use in women is increasing worldwide, research into gender differences in cannabis use disorder (CUD) symptomology is lacking. In response to limited effectiveness of addiction treatment, research focus has been shifting from clinical diagnoses towards interactions between symptoms, as patterns of symptoms and their intera...

Background and aims: Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for develop...

The neurobiological bases of the association between development and psychopathology remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a shared spatial pattern of cortical thickness (CT) in normative development and several psychiatric and neurological disorders. Principal component analysis (PCA) was applied to CT of 68 regions in the Desikan-Killiany a...

The social plasticity hypothesis proposes that social attunement, that is, the adaptation to and harmonization with one's environment, plays a crucial role in the risk for developing alcohol use disorders (AUDs) during adolescence, whereas in adulthood it paradoxically may make individuals more sensitive to the social pull to reduce drinking. This...

Research demonstrates the effects of social context on individual drinking, but the underlying neural processes remain unclear. For this purpose, we developed a social multi-sensory alcohol cue-reactivity (SMAC) fMRI task. Neural activity during visually presented offers to drink beer or water while listening to audio fragments of social drinking c...

Childhood adversity (CA) is associated with increased risk for physical and mental health problems, with alterations in vagal regulation (an aspect of autonomic functioning indexed by vagally-mediated heart rate variability [vmHRV]) implicated as a mechanism. Three-level meta-analyses were conducted to synthesize research on the relationship betwee...

Introduction Alcohol-related cues trigger relapse in patients with alcohol use disorders (AUDs). These cues may automatically activate motivational approach tendencies. Through computerised cognitive bias modification (CBM), the tendencies of patients with AUD to approach alcohol can be reduced. The present protocol describes a training interventio...

Background and Aims Substance use disorders (SUD) are associated with cognitive deficits that are not always addressed in current treatments, and this hampers recovery. Cognitive training and remediation interventions are well suited to fill the gap for managing cognitive deficits in SUD. We aimed to reach consensus on recommendations for developin...

Co-use of cannabis and tobacco is common and associated with worse clinical outcomes compared to cannabis use only. The mechanisms and interactions of cannabis use disorder (CUD) symptoms underlying co-use remain poorly understood. We examined differences in the symptom presence and symptom network configurations between daily tobacco co-users (n =...

BACKGROUND Depression and anxiety are common mental health conditions in college/ university student populations. Offering transdiagnostic, web-based prevention programs, such as ICare Prevent, to those with subclinical complaints has the potential to reduce some barriers to receiving help, e.g., availability of services, privacy considerations, an...

Background Depression and anxiety are common mental health conditions in college and university student populations. Offering transdiagnostic, web-based prevention programs such as ICare Prevent to those with subclinical complaints has the potential to reduce some barriers to receiving help (eg, availability of services, privacy considerations, and...

While physical activity provides substantial health benefits, cardiac rehabilitation patients do not reach the recommended physical activity levels after discharge from clinics (1, 2). Traditional interventions providing knowledge about theses expected health benefits do not appear to be sufficient (3). Recent research on automatically activated pr...

Background and aims: Approach bias modification (ApBM) targeting alcohol approach bias has been previously shown to reduce likelihood of relapse during the first 2 weeks following inpatient withdrawal treatment (IWT). We tested whether ApBM's effects endure for a longer period by analysing alcohol use outcomes 3, 6, and 12 months post-discharge....

Guided internet-based treatment is more efficacious than completely unguided or self-guided internet-based treatment, yet within the spectrum of guidance, little is known about the added value of human support compared to more basic forms of guidance. The primary aims of this meta-analysis were: (1) to examine whether human guidance was more effica...

Research deployed via the internet and administered via smartphones could have access to more diverse samples than lab-based research. Diverse samples could have relatively high variation in their traits and so yield relatively reliable measurements of individual differences in these traits. Several cognitive tasks that originated from the experime...

Background Implementation intentions have been demonstrated to reduce alcohol use in retrospective self-report measures. It remains unclear, however, whether they can moderate drinking in a challenging naturalistic context. We examined this by studying the effects of implementation intentions on alcohol use in a bar. Methods One hundred and twenty...

Background. While cannabis use in women is increasing worldwide, research into gender differences in cannabis use disorder (CUD) symptomology is lacking. In response to limited effectiveness of addiction treatment, research focus has been shifting from clinical diagnoses towards interactions between symptoms, as patterns of symptoms and their inter...

The Abbreviated Math Anxiety Scale (AMAS) is commonly used to compare groups on math anxiety. Group comparisons should however be preceded by a demonstration of metric and scalar measurement invariance, which is currently only available for undergraduate students in the USA. This study tested for metric and scalar measurement invariance of AMAS sco...

Many college students reduce hazardous drinking (HD) following graduation without treatment. Identifying cognitive mechanisms facilitating this “natural” reduction in HD during this transition is crucial. We evaluated drinking identity as a potential mechanism and tested whether within-persons changes in one’s social network’s drinking were linked...

Background Cigarette smoking poses a major threat to public health. While cessation support provided by healthcare professionals is effective, its use remains low. Chatbots have the potential to serve as a useful addition. The objective of this study is to explore the possibility of using a motivational interviewing style chatbot to enhance engagem...

The core ideas of a 10-year research program ‘New Science of Mental Disorders’ are outlined. This research program moves away from the disorder-based ‘one-model-fits-all’ approach to treating mental disorders, and adopts the network approach to psychopathology as its foundation of research. Its core assumption is that dynamically interacting sympto...

For decades predictors of alcohol use disorder (AUD) relapse have been studied, and around 40 different clinical and demographic relapse determinants have been identified. This paper aims to investigate the relationship of two of these AUD relapse factors, namely craving and meaning in life (MiL). We hypothesized that greater meaning in life would...

This case study focuses on the treatment of a 44-year-old Dutch man presenting with an anxious God representation and religious struggles according to DSM-5 criteria. Having received prior treatment for a panic disorder and alcohol use disorder, the patient was given a 60-day treatment in which the Jesus Prayer intervention was used to address his...

The social plasticity hypothesis proposes that social attunement, i.e., the adaptation to and harmonization with one’s environment, plays a crucial role in the risk for developing alcohol use disorders (AUDs) during adolescence, while in adulthood, it may paradoxically make individuals more sensitive to the social pull to reduce drinking. This stud...

Resting-state EEG reflects intrinsic brain activity and its alteration represents changes in cognition that are related to neuropathology. Thereby, it provides a way of revealing the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning chronic substance use. In addition, it is documented that some neurocognitive functions can recover following sustained abstinen...

Insecure attachment is a transdiagnostic personality factor which may confer risk for mental health issues. The mechanisms underlying this association may be partly explained by loneliness. Loneliness, which is common in young adulthood, also concerns social relationships and is similarly associated with negative mental health outcomes. This study...

Recent times have seen a call for personalized psychotherapy and tailored communication during treatment, leading to the necessity to model the complex dynamics of mental disorders in a single subject. To this aim, time-series data in one patient can be collected through ecological momentary assessment and analyzed with the graphical vector autoreg...

Common mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety, often emerge in college students during the transition into early adulthood. Mental health problems can seriously impact students' functioning, interpersonal relationships, and academic achievement. Actively reaching out to college students with mental health problems and offering them intern...

Objective The COVID-19 pandemic has confronted young adults with an unprecedented mental health challenge. Yet, prospective studies examining protective factors are limited. Methods In the present study, we focused on changes in mental health in a large sample (N = 685) of at-risk university students, which were measured before and during the pand...

Existing tasks assessing substance-related attentional biases are characterized by low internal consistency and test–retest reliability. This study aimed to assess the psychometric properties of a novel dual-probe task to measure alcohol-related attentional bias. Undergraduate students were recruited in June 2019 (N = 63; final N = 57; mean age = 2...

Background and aims Graph theoretic analysis of structural covariance networks (SCN) provides an assessment of brain organization that has not yet been applied to alcohol dependence (AD). We estimated whether SCN differences are present in adults with AD and heavy drinking adolescents at age 19 and age 14, prior to substantial exposure to alcohol....

Research deployed via the internet and administered via smartphones could have access to more diverse samples than lab-based research. Diverse samples could have relatively high variation in their traits and so yield relatively reliable measurements of individual differences in these traits. Cognitive tasks have been reported to yield relatively lo...

Addiction is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon, impacted by biological predispositions, psychological processes, and the social environment. Using mathematical and computational models that allow for surrogative reasoning may be a promising avenue for gaining a deeper understanding of this complex behavior. This paper reviews and classifies a se...

Introduction Emerging adulthood is a phase in life that is associated with an increased risk to develop a variety of mental health disorders including anxiety and depression. However, less than 25% of university students receive professional help for their mental health reports. Internet-based cognitive behavioural therapy (iCBT) may entail useful...

Background The act of smoking has been associated with the automatic activation of approach biases towards smoking-related stimuli. However, previous research has produced mixed findings when smokers are trained to avoid such smoking-related stimuli through the application of Approach Bias Modification (ApBM). As such, this study aimed to test an i...

Aims This study used a behavioral approach-avoidance task including images of alcoholic beverages to test whether low sensitivity to alcohol (LS) is a phenotypic marker of a dispositional propensity to attribute bottom-up incentive value to naturally conditioned alcohol cues Design, setting, and participants Experimental study with a measured indi...

Urbanisation and common mental disorders (CMDs; ie, depressive, anxiety, and substance use disorders) are increasing worldwide. In this Review, we discuss how urbanicity and risk of CMDs relate to each other and call for a complexity science approach to advance understanding of this interrelationship. We did an ecological analysis using data on urb...

Introduction Web-based smoking interventions hold potential for smoking cessation; however, many of them report low intervention usage (i.e., high levels of non-usage attrition). One strategy to counter this issue is to tailor such interventions to user subtypes if these can be identified and related to non-usage attrition outcomes. The aim of this...

Interest in unintended discrimination that can result from implicit attitudes and stereotypes (implicit biases) has stimulated many research investigations. Much of this research has used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to measure association strengths that are presumed to underlie implicit biases. It had been more than a decade since the last...

Problematic smartphone use (PSU) has recently attracted a lot of attention, especially among adolescents. The knowledge about the role peer engagement might play in the development of PSU is still limited. We aimed to investigate the bidirectional relationships between PSU, the quantity of online (i.e., passive and active social media messaging on...

Introduction Being physically active is associated with a wide range of health benefits in patients. However, many patients do not engage in the recommended levels of physical activity (PA). To date, interventions promoting PA in patients mainly rely on providing knowledge about the benefits associated with PA to develop their motivation to be acti...

Psychological problems like procrastination, perfectionism, low self-esteem, test anxiety and stress are common among college students. There are evidence-based interventions available for these problems that not only have direct effects on these problems, but also indirect effects on mental disorders such as depression and anxiety disorders. Targe...

Background While taxonomy segregates anxiety symptoms into diagnoses, patients typically present with multiple diagnoses; this poses major challenges, particularly for youth, where mixed presentation is particularly common. Anxiety comorbidity could reflect multivariate, cross-domain interactions insufficiently emphasized in current taxonomy. We ut...

Research on the etiology of dyslexia typically uses an approach based on a single core deficit, failing to understand how variations in combinations of factors contribute to reading development and how this combination relates to intervention outcome. To fill this gap, this study explored links between 28 cognitive, environmental, and demographic v...

The choice of cortisol sampling times in early childhood studies varies widely. Given that recommendations on sampling protocols are largely based on adults, the present study aimed to broaden current knowledge by examining how reliably cortisol measures obtained at different daytimes would reveal between-individual differences in toddlers’ cortiso...

Introduction Current treatments for cocaine use disorder (CUD) are not very effective and better treatments are needed. This study investigates the effectiveness of a combined intervention that targets the assumed underlying glutamate pathology in cocaine users. To this end, the combined effects of N-acetylcysteine (NAC) and working memory (WM) tra...

Objective: Approach bias modification (ApBM) is a promising new add-on training intervention for patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD). Given that comorbid anxiety and major depressive disorders are very common in AUD, and that such comorbidity affects psychological treatments negatively, the primary aim of the present study was investigating wh...

Estimating the reliability of cognitive task datasets is commonly done via split-half methods. We review four methods that differ in how the trials are split into parts: a first-second half split, an odd-even trial split, a permutated split, and a Monte Carlo-based split. Additionally, each splitting method could be combined with stratification by...

Background Attentional bias for substance-relevant cues has been found to contribute to the persistence of addiction. Attentional bias modification (ABM) interventions might, therefore, increase positive treatment outcome and reduce relapse rates. The current study investigated the effectiveness of a newly developed home-delivered, multi-session, i...

Moderate alcohol intake may impair stimulus-driven inhibition of motor actions in go/no-go and stop-signal tasks. Exposure to alcohol-related cues has been found to exacerbate this impairment. By contrast, the effect of alcohol use on intentional inhibition, or the capacity to voluntarily suspend an action, has rarely been investigated. We examined...

Dysregulated autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity has been associated with adolescent risk-taking and internalizing behavior, but previous results in community samples have been mixed. We investigated whether ANS activity was associated with higher risk-taking and internalizing behavior in young adolescents (age 11/12; n = 875), and whether adol...

Itch draws our attention to allow imposing action against bodily harm (e.g., remove insects). At the same time, itch is found to interfere with ongoing tasks and daily life goals. Despite the key role of attention in itch processing, interventions that train individuals to automatically disengage attention from itch cues are lacking. The present pr...

Background Poor mental health has consistently been associated with substance use (smoking, alcohol drinking, cannabis use, and consumption of caffeinated drinks). To properly inform public health policy it is crucial to understand the mechanisms underlying these associations, and most importantly, whether or not they are causal. Methods In this p...

Dual process models posit that combinations of impulsive and reflective processes drive behaviour, and that the capacity to engage in effortful cognitive processing moderates the relation between measures of impulsive or reflective processes and actual behaviour. When cognitive resources are low, impulsive processes are more likely to drive behavio...

Addiction is a complex biopsychosocial phenomenon, impacted by biological predispositions, psychological processes, and the social environment. Using mathematical and computational models that are capable of surrogative rea- soning may be a promising avenue for gaining a deeper understanding of this complex behavior. This paper reviews formal model...

BACKGROUND Alcohol use and anxiety disorders commonly co-occur, resulting in a more severe clinical presentation and poorer response to single-disorder treatments. Research has shown that Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) and Interpretation Bias Modification (IBM) cognitive re-training interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments that imp...

Background Alcohol use and anxiety disorders commonly co-occur, resulting in a more severe clinical presentation and poorer response to treatment. Research has shown that approach bias modification (ApBM) and interpretation bias modification (IBM) cognitive retraining interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments that improve outcomes for...

Background While it is generally recognised that cognitive attributes can predict behaviour change outcomes in the field of addiction this question is typically studied in treatment seeking samples (to predict treatment outcomes and relapse). However the concept of behaviour change applies to the entire spectrum of addiction-like behaviours and ini...

UNSTRUCTURED While there has been increasing interest in the use of gamification in mental healthcare, there is a lack of design knowledge on how elements from games could be integrated into existing therapeutic treatment activities in a manner which is balanced and effective. To help address this issue, we propose a design process framework to sup...

While there has been increasing interest in the use of gamification in mental health care, there is a lack of design knowledge on how elements from games could be integrated into existing therapeutic treatment activities in a manner that is balanced and effective. To help address this issue, we propose a design process framework to support the deve...

Young people, whose brains are still developing, might entail a greater vulnerability to the effects of alcohol consumption on brain function and development. A committee of experts of the Health Council of the Netherlands evaluated the state of scientific knowledge regarding the question whether alcohol negatively influences brain development in y...

Brain asymmetry reflects left‐right hemispheric differentiation, which is a quantitative brain phenotype that develops with age and can vary with psychiatric diagnoses. Previous studies have shown that substance dependence is associated with altered brain structure and function. However, it is unknown whether structural brain asymmetries are differ...

Objective: To assess changes in cannabis use in young adults as a function of psychotic-like experiences. Method: Participants were initially recruited at age 14 in high schools for the longitudinal IMAGEN study. All measures presented here were assessed at follow-ups at age 19 and at age 22, respectively. Perceived stress was only assessed once at...