Depression

Blije gezichten en andere beloningen: aandacht voor positieve informatie als beschermend mechanisme tegen depressie

This is a Dutch summary of my PhD thesis Happy faces and other rewards. Positieve informatie roept vaak sterke reacties op, maar niet bij iedereen. Wie minder sterk reageert op positieve informatie heeft een zogenaamde lage positieve bias. In dit …

Happy Faces and Other Rewards: Different Perspectives on a Bias Away from Positive and Toward Negative Information as an Underlying Mechanism of Depression

People generally show strong responses to positive or rewarding experiences, for example, winning a prize or seeing someone smile. However, not all people respond the same to positive information; some people show weaker responses to positive …

Low Reward Responsiveness at age 16 Predicts Onset of Depression During 9 Years of Follow-up (poster presentation SRCD)

This study investigated whether low reward responsiveness marks vulnerability for developing depression in a large cohort of never-depressed 16-year-old adolescents who completed a reward task and were subsequently followed for 9 years, during which …

Reward-Related Attentional Bias at Age 16 Predicts Onset of Depression During 9 Years of Follow-up

This study investigated whether low reward responsiveness marks vulnerability for developing depression in a large cohort of never-depressed 16-year-old adolescents who completed a reward task and were subsequently followed for 9 years, during which …

Alpha-amylase reactivity and recovery patterns in anhedonic young adults performing a tandem skydive

Background Anhedonia (loss of pleasure) is characterized by low responsiveness to rewards and, by virtue of being one of the two core symptoms of depression, by altered responses to stress. We investigated the effect of an acute stress experience …

An Exploratory Randomized Controlled Trial of Personalized Lifestyle Advice and Tandem Skydives as a Means to Reduce Anhedonia

Anhedonia is a major public health concern and has proven particularly difficult to counteract. It has been hypothesized that anhedonia can be deterred by engagement in rewarding social and physical events. The aims of the present study were to …

Lower Sensitivity to Happy and Angry Facial Emotions in Young Adults with Psychiatric Problems

Many psychiatric problem domains have been associated with emotion-specific biases or general deficiencies in facial emotion identification. However, both within and between psychiatric problem domains, large variability exists in the types of …

Slow identification of facial happiness in early adolescence predicts onset of depression during 8 years of follow-up

Facial emotion identification bias has been suggested as trait marker for depression, but results have been inconclusive. To explore whether facial emotion identification biases may be trait markers for depression, we tested whether the speed with …

Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial to explore the effects of personalized lifestyle advices and tandem skydives on pleasure in anhedonic young adults

Anhedonia is generally defined as the inability to feel pleasure in response to experiences that are usually enjoyable. Anhedonia is one of the two core symptoms of depression and is a major public health concern. Anhedonia has proven particularly …

Positive bias and mental health

My main line of research concerns positive bias, i.e., the phenomenon that many people see the world more brightly and more positive than it really is, and whether and at what ages individual differences in positive bias are associated with differences in mental and social functioning.