Reinout W Wiers

• Ph. D.
• Professor at University of Amsterdam

Although it is normative for children to desire praise, some might show addiction to praise. We define praise addiction as a strong reliance on praise: a constant seeking of praise, prioritization of praise-seeking, and distress when praise is not received. Some scholars argue that praise addiction is central to narcissism. Despite extensive theori...

Background: Interoceptive processes may underlie maladaptive patterns of alcohol use. Bodily sensations experienced during alcohol intoxication could therefore reveal distinct mechanistic components relevant for addiction theory and research. Here we apply novel tools to examine how intoxication impacts somatic awareness using bodily maps and a car...

Mental health disparities have been reported among sexual minority individuals; minority stress theory posits that such disparities are a result of stigma and discrimination. We estimated the prevalence of mental disorders across sexual orientation groups among first-year college students and whether differences across sexual orientation groups var...

Urban environments are related to higher prevalences of common mental disorders (addictions, anxieties and mood disorders) in adults. The mechanisms underlying this relationship are less clear. Cities function as a magnet, related to economic and educational opportunities, but are also related to urban stress and low well‐being. Urban areas have la...

Objectives. Promoting regular physical activity (PA) is essential in cardiac rehabilitation; yet many patients exhibit low levels of PA. In January 2022, the Improving Physical Activity (IMPACT) trial, a randomised controlled trial at the University Hospital of Geneva, was launched to promote PA in cardiac patients by targeting automatic approach t...

In this chapter, the theoretical background of (digital) cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is presented, along with cognitive bias modification (CBM), a novel set of interventions in which cognitive processes involved in a disorder are directly targeted. Next, the effectiveness of digital CBT and CBM for common mental health disorders (depression,...

Aim: Negative affect can trigger overconsumption of appetitive substances, but specific mechanisms and individual risk factors remain unclear. In two pre-registered studies, we tested whether negative affect increases approach bias and craving for chocolate and alcohol, with strongest effects expected in individuals with self-reported emotional int...

Background: Recent models of the development of adolescent psychopathology emphasize the dynamic interplay between substance use and internalizing and externalizing symptoms. Importantly, this interplay may be moderated by known risk factors of substance use and internalizing/externalizing symptoms, particularly impaired working memory capacity and...

Background Cigarette smoking poses a major public health risk, requiring scalable and accessible interventions. Chatbots offer a promising solution, given their potential in providing personalized, long-term interactions. Despite their promise, limited research has examined their efficacy and the intertwined relationship between user experience and...

Purpose Cognitive vulnerability to anxiety can partly be explained by an interplay of attentional biases and control processes. This suggests that when aiming to reduce anxiety, simultaneously reducing an attentional bias for threat and strengthening control processes would be the optimal approach. We investigated whether a combined web-based Atten...

Background The complex interactions between an individual's drinking behavior and their social environment is crucial but understudied, particularly in mature adult populations. Our aim is to unravel these complexities by investigating how personal drinking patterns are related to those of one's social environment over time, and what the interplay...

Objectives Anti-tobacco campaigns often suffer from a lack of systematic evaluation and may not always have the intended impact on the target population. Our research adopted immersive virtual reality (iVR) to systematically evaluate preventive anti-tobacco messages in a controlled setting while mimicking a naturalistic and ecological environment....

As the global urban population surpasses 50%, understanding the impact of urban environments on mental health is crucial. This study examines the relationship between urbanicity and the prevalence of depression and anxiety disorders in the United Kingdom (UK; N = 449,323), New Zealand (N = 33,042), and Norway (N = 13,238). We address the limitation...

The current study aimed to test the effectiveness of ABC-training in influencing drinking behaviors during voluntary abstinence challenges, compared with Approach Bias Modification (ApBM) and sham-ApBM. We conducted two randomized controlled trial studies with three between-subject conditions: ABC-training, conventional ApBM, and sham-ApBM. Assessm...

Background: A cognitively demanding, alcohol-specific inhibition training (Alc-IT) might enhance treatment success in patients with severe alcohol use disorder (AUD; Stein et al., 2023). An inhibitory working mechanism for Alc-IT has been discussed, but compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis is yet lacking. The present study investigates in...

Given that surrender to God has been associated with health and well-being in believers, research in this area would benefit from the availability of scales outside the United States, where these were first developed. To this end, we conducted two studies (N = 130 and N = 574) in Christian samples in the Netherlands to test the psychometric propert...

The rich get richer and the poor face poverty in cities. Inspired by this economic accumulation, we study if domains of psychological well-being also accumulate across six psychological dimensions in cities. According to accumulation theory, we expect the most pronounced urban-rural disparities in the extremes of a total well-being distribution. We...

Objective Motivation is considered a key factor in successful treatment. Unfortunately, detained youth typically show lower motivation for treatment and behavioral change. This pilot study examined the effects of a brief Motivational Interviewing (MI) protocol in conjunction with a Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) intervention aimed at reducing su...

Over the past decade, longitudinal network analyses have gained significant traction in psychological science. These approaches, applied to intensive time-series or panel data, require a high level of flexibility and involve numerous modeling decisions, which can introduce considerable degrees of freedom into the process. Despite their growing use...

Background Patients with alcohol use disorder (AUD) tend to selectively approach alcohol cues in the environment, demonstrating an alcohol‐approach bias. Alcohol‐approach‐bias modification (Alcohol‐ApBM) effectively increases abstinence rates in patients with AUD when added to abstinence‐focused treatment, but the evidence for its proposed working...

Background Cigarette smoking poses a major public health risk. Chatbots may serve as an accessible and useful tool to promote cessation due to their high accessibility and potential in facilitating long-term personalized interactions. To increase effectiveness and acceptability, there remains a need to identify and evaluate counseling strategies fo...

Emerging adulthood is an important developmental phase often accompanied by peaks in loneliness, social anxiety, and depression. However, knowledge is lacking on how the relationships between emotional loneliness, social loneliness, social isolation, social anxiety and depression evolve over time. Gaining insight in these temporal relations is cruc...

Background: Mothers who misuse substances encounter stigma which can lead them to avoid seeking addiction treatment; however, there are no tools that assess their perceptions of such stigma. We therefore aimed to provide the initial development and tests for internal consistency and construct validity of a tool that measures perceived community sti...

Before we can make any choice, we must gather information from the environment about what our options are. This information-gathering process is critically mediated by attention, and our attention is, in turn, shaped by our previous experiences with—and learning about—stimuli and their consequences. In this review, we highlight studies demonstratin...

Background Both impulsivity and compulsivity have been identified as risk factors for problematic use of the internet (PUI). Yet little is known about the relationship between impulsivity, compulsivity and individual PUI symptoms, limiting a more precise understanding of mechanisms underlying PUI. Aims The current study is the first to use network...

Background: According to cognitive theories, loneliness is associated with biased cognitive processes. However, studies investigating interpretation bias (IB) related to feelings of loneliness are scarce. The current study aimed to investigate (a) whether emotional loneliness (perceived absence of intimacy) and social loneliness (perceived absence...

Background Drinking identity (the extent to which one links the self with drinking alcohol) is a unique risk factor for college students' hazardous drinking that is not directly targeted by existing interventions. We conducted a study that aimed to decrease drinking identity among college students with hazardous drinking. We adapted a writing task...

Background and aims Problematic smartphone use (PSU) has gained attention, but its definition remains debated. This study aimed to develop and validate a new scale measuring PSU-the Smartphone Use Problems Identification Questionnaire (SUPIQ). Methods Using two separate samples, a university community sample ( N = 292) and a general population sam...

b> Introduction: Abstinence rates after inpatient treatment for alcohol use disorder (AUD) are modest (1-year rate around 50%). One promising approach is to re-train the automatically activated action tendency to approach alcohol-related stimuli (alcohol-approach bias) in AUD patients, as add-on to regular treatment. As efficacy has been demonstrat...

Background Attentional biases towards reward stimuli have been implicated in substance use-related problems. The value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) task assesses such reward-related biases. The VMAC task widely used in lab studies tends to be monotonous and susceptible to low effort. We therefore tested a gamified online version of the VMAC...

High levels of effortful control have been shown to protect children from negative health outcomes following early adversity. In this study, we tested whether effortful control already moderates the effects of parenting stress on children’s cortisol levels in toddlerhood. In 31 families, parental reports of parenting stress and toddlers’ effortful...

Due to pandemic-induced lockdown(s) in 2020, dyslexia treatment was forced to move to online platforms. This study examined whether Dutch children who received online treatment progressed as much in their reading and spelling performance as children who received the usual face-to-face treatment. To this end, 254 children who received treatment-as-u...

Introduction There are growing concerns about commonly inflated effect sizes in small neuroimaging studies, yet no study has addressed recalibrating effect size estimates for small samples. To tackle this issue, we propose a hierarchical Bayesian model to adjust the magnitude of single-study effect sizes while incorporating a tailored estimation of...

Researchers have increasingly adopted complex methodological approaches to investigate the co-development of symptoms over longer time frames, such as months and years. Panel studies assess a large group of individuals at multiple time points over an extended period. Various analytical approaches exist for examining the co-development of variables...

High perceived stress is associated with psychological and academic difficulties among college students. In this study, we aimed to investigate associations of student status (international vs domestic student in the Netherlands) with eight common sources of stress (i.e., financial, health, love life, relationship with family, relationship with peo...

Objective Early adolescence is a transition period during which many mental health 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 ris...

Background A comprehensive picture is lacking of the impact of early childhood (age 0–5) risk factors on the subsequent development of mental health symptoms. Objective In this systematic review, we investigated which individual, social and urban factors, experienced in early childhood, contribute to the development of later anxiety and depression...

Practical recommendations for performing research in closed youth care settings Performing research in a forensic setting poses certain challenges, especially when it pertains to complex or sensitive research designs. As a result, studies often end up with small sample sizes which limits reliability and generalizability of the results, and conseque...

Whilst opportunities to participate in gambling have increased, access to support for problem gamblers is lacking behind. This lack of balance calls for improved and accessible intervention methods. The present double-blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) explored the effectiveness of two interventions targeting automatic cognitive processes, kno...

Objective Despite their potential in improving health behaviors, such as physical activity (PA), the effectiveness of interventions targeting automatic precursors remains contrasted. We examined the effects of a single session of ABC training – a personalized consequence-based approach-avoidance training – on PA, relative to an active control condi...

Promising new approach to discover causal factors that drive mental disorders Franzi Schutzeichel used a relatively new approach that is thus far underused in clinical psychology to examine what factors are causally involved in the development of mental disorders such as eating disorders and the frequently co-occurring symptoms of depression and a...

Background One of the most prominent theories of drug addiction is the incentive sensitization model. Individual differences in the tendency to ascribe motivational salience to cues that predict reward, and their ability to promote reward-seeking behaviour have been identified as potentially important in understanding vulnerability to addiction and...

Background Interpretation bias modification (IBM) and approach bias modification (ApBM) cognitive retraining interventions can be efficacious adjunctive treatments for improving social anxiety and alcohol use problems. However, previous trials have not examined the combination of these interventions in a young, comorbid sample. Objective This stud...

The relationship between heaviness of use and the approach bias (i.e., stronger approach than avoidance tendencies) toward tobacco remains ambiguous at both theoretical and empirical levels. Indeed, some models of addition would formulate opposite predictions (i.e., positive vs. negative relationship) and, as it turns out, current evidence is mixed...

Attentional bias towards rewards has been extensively studied in both healthy and clinical populations. Several studies have shown an association between reward value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) and greater substance use. However, less is known about the association between these VMAC effects and internalizing symptoms. Moreover, while VMA...

BACKGROUND Cigarette smoking poses a major public health risk. Chatbots may serve as an accessible and useful tool to promote cessation due to their high accessibility and potential in facilitating long-term personalized interactions. To increase effectiveness and acceptability, there remains a need to identify and evaluate counseling strategies fo...

Background. Attentional biases towards reward stimuli have been implicated in psychopathology, specifically in substance use-related problems. The value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) task assesses such reward-related biases. The VMAC task has been employed in numerous lab studies, however, it is rather tedious to do. We therefore tested a ga...

Background and aims Competing models disagree on three theoretical questions regarding alcohol‐related attentional bias (AB), a key process in severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD): (1) is AB more of a trait (fixed, associated with alcohol use severity) or state (fluid, associated with momentary craving states) characteristic of SAUD; (2) does AB pure...

Self-regulation has been intensely studied across developmental science disciplines in virtue of its significance to understanding and fostering adaptive functioning throughout life. Whereas research has predominantly focused on self-regulatory abilities, age-related changes in goals and motivation that underlie self-regulation have been largely ne...

Trauma cue-elicited activation of automatic cannabis-related cognitive biases are theorized to contribute to comorbid posttraumatic stress disorder and cannabis use disorder. This phenomenon can be studied experimentally by combining the trauma cue reactivity paradigm (CRP) with cannabis-related cognitive processing tasks. In this study, we used a...

BACKGROUND Internet-based cognitive behavioral interventions (iCBT) are efficacious treatments of depression and anxiety. Yet, it is unknown whether adding human guidance is feasible and beneficial within a large educational setting. OBJECTIVE To potentially demonstrate: (1) the superiority of two variants of a transdiagnostic iCBT program (human-...

Background Internet-based cognitive behavioral interventions (iCBTs) are efficacious treatments for depression and anxiety. However, it is unknown whether adding human guidance is feasible and beneficial within a large educational setting. Objective This study aims to potentially demonstrate the superiority of 2 variants of a transdiagnostic iCBT...

Transdiagnostic individually-tailored digital interventions reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety in adults with moderate effects. However, research into these approaches for college students is scarce and contradicting. In addition, the exact reasons for intervention dropout in this target group are not well known, and the use of individually-...

Background and aims: ABC-training is a new intervention to encourage health behavior change that targets the automatic activation of adaptive beliefs (i.e. automatic inferences). The aim of this proof-of-principle study was to test the effectiveness of web-based ABC-training to change outcome expectancies of alcohol drinking in a sample of hazardo...

Conversational agents (CAs, aka chatbots) for behavioral interventions have great potential to improve patient engagement and provide solutions that can benefit human health. In this study, we examined the potential efficacy of chatbots in assisting with the resolution of specific barriers that people frequently encounter when doing behavioral inte...

Background Math anxiety in adolescence negatively affects learning math and careers. The current study investigated whether three cognitive biases, i.e. math-failure associations, attentional biases (engagement and disengagement), and avoidance bias for math, were related to math anxiety and math behaviour (math grade and math avoidance behaviour)....

Adding cognitive bias modification (CBM) to treatment as usual for alcohol use disorders has been found to reduce relapse rates. However, CBM has not yielded effects as a stand-alone intervention. One possible reason may be that this is due to CBM effects being underpinned by inferential rather than associative mental mechanisms. This change in per...

Evidence for approach bias tendencies to underly automatic behavioural impulses towards seeking out gambling activities in the presence of appetitive salient cues was first shown by Boffo et al. (2018) in a Dutch sample. Relative to non-problem gamblers, moderate-to-high-risk gamblers demonstrated stronger approach tendencies towards gambling-relat...

In the past two decades, a variety of cognitive training interventions have been developed to help people overcome their addictive behaviors. Conceptually, it is important to distinguish between programs in which reactions to addiction-relevant cues are trained (varieties of cognitive bias modification, CBM) and programs in which general abilities...

Background and aims: Models of alcohol use risk suggest that drinking motives represent the most proximal risk factors on which more distal factors converge. However, little is known about how distinct risk factors influence each other and alcohol use on different temporal scales (within a given moment vs. over time). We aimed to estimate the dyna...

Background Learning which letters correspond to which speech sounds is fundamental for learning to read. Based on previous experimental studies, we developed a serious game aiming to boost letter‐speech sound (L‐SS) correspondences in a motivational game environment. Objectives The goal of this study was to determine the efficacy of this game in t...

Background: Concurrent use (co-use) of cannabis and tobacco is common and associated with worse clinical outcomes compared with cannabis use only. The mechanisms and interactions of cannabis use disorder (CUD) symptoms underlying co-use remain poorly understood. Methods: We examined differences in the symptom presence and symptom network configurat...

Attentional bias towards rewards has been extensively studied in both healthy and clinical populations. Several studies have shown an association between reward value-modulated attentional capture (VMAC) and greater substance use. However, less is known about the association between these VMAC effects and internalizing symptoms. Moreover, while VMA...

Objective. Despite their role in health behaviors, such as physical activity (PA), the effectiveness of interventions targeting automatic precursors remains inconsistent. We examined the effects of a single session of ABC training – a personalized and consequence-based approach-avoidance training – on PA, relative to an active control condition and...

Background Alcohol‐dependent individuals tend to selectively approach alcohol cues in the environment, demonstrating an alcohol approach bias. Because 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 become a part of re...

Background Despite considerable research efforts, consistent predictors of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) outcome for social anxiety disorder (SAD) are scarce. A dynamic focus on individual symptom reactivity and resilience patterns may show promise in predicting treatment response. This pilot study is the first to investigate whether rate of r...

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...