Publications by authors named "Peter J De Jong"

Objective: Recent studies underscore the relevance of life meaning to the maintenance of eating disorders. A previously conducted randomized controlled trial tested a meaning-centered intervention for female university students with high weight and shape concerns. After a 6-week online intervention led by a trainer, participants in the intervention condition scored higher on life meaning and lower on eating disorder symptoms and general distress compared to a waitlist group.

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Following the death of a loved one, both approach behaviors related to the deceased (i.e., engagement with feelings, memories, and/or reminders of the deceased) and the avoidance of reminders of the death are theorized to precipitate severe and persistent grief reactions, termed prolonged grief.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study explores how different mental health issues, specifically internalizing (like depression and anxiety) and externalizing problems, interact during early adolescence, a critical time for mental health development.
  • - Researchers used data from over 1,600 adolescents and employed advanced statistical methods to analyze the relationships between these mental health symptoms and executive functioning (EF), revealing complex feedback loops among various anxiety symptoms.
  • - Findings suggest that addressing depressive symptoms early on in adolescents is crucial to preventing a range of other internalizing issues from developing later, highlighting the need for targeted interventions.
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Psychological treatments for social anxiety disorder (SAD) in adolescents have shown poorer outcomes than for other anxiety disorders. A relevant factor to consider for improving outcomes may be negative imagery. In this pilot study, we examined negative 'flashforward' imagery of feared catastrophic outcomes in adolescents with SAD and evaluated the feasibility and preliminary outcomes of a short eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) intervention targeting this imagery.

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Objective: This study differentiated between self-reported punishment responsivity (PR) and motivation to avoid punishment (MP) and examined their relationship with anorexia nervosa (AN) and its course in a combined cross-sectional and longitudinal approach. We explored whether inconsistent findings regarding reward sensitivity may be explained by previous research not differentiating between reward responsivity (RR) and motivation to approach reward (MR).

Method: Participants were 69 adolescents with AN and 69 adolescents without AN matched on age, sex and educational level.

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This study tested to what extent the relation between bullying victimization and future symptoms of depression could be explained by victims being more hostile and less assertive than non-involved individuals. Data came from waves 2-4 of the Dutch TRacking Adolescents' Individual Lives Survey (TRAILS). Participants' bullying experiences were assessed at age 13, interpersonal style at age 16, and depression symptoms at age 19.

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Article Synopsis
  • - Psychological treatment for social anxiety disorder (SAD) is less effective than for other anxiety disorders, but focusing on the negative mental images associated with SAD could improve treatment outcomes.
  • - A systematic review of 21 studies found that imagery-based interventions, particularly imagery rescripting, showed promising effects on reducing social anxiety and imagery distress, especially in those with a clinical diagnosis of SAD.
  • - Future research should explore how these imagery interventions can enhance existing treatments for SAD and consider including younger populations, as some limitations were identified in the current studies.
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People consume alcohol for multiple reasons. Negative motives are often associated with alcohol-related problems. These problems might be explained by negative effects of high alcohol consumption on empathy.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how childhood trauma (CT) affects both explicit (reflective) and implicit (associative) self-esteem, and whether this self-esteem influences the link between CT and depression/anxiety.
  • In a sample of 1,479 adults, results showed that those with CT had lower explicit self-esteem, while implicit self-esteem was only lower in cases of emotional neglect.
  • Explicit self-esteem was found to mediate the relationship between CT and symptoms of depression/anxiety, indicating it could be an important focus for treatment in individuals affected by CT.
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  • The study explores a gamified version of the VMAC task to assess attentional biases towards rewards and their connection to substance use issues and addictive behaviors.
  • Participants (285 individuals, including heavy alcohol users) completed the task alongside measures of substance use, cognitive control, and executive function problems.
  • While the gamified VMAC task effectively identified attentional capture toward high-reward stimuli, no significant links were found between VMAC scores and substance use problems; however, self-reported cognitive difficulties correlated with increased issues related to alcohol and cannabis use.
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Disgust-based body image concerns can bias autobiographical memory towards the recall and avoidant processing of disgust-related memories of the own body. Repeated exposure to such memories may help breaking avoidance and promote the habituation of disgust, thereby lowering body concerns. Using a pre-post within-participant experimental design, we tested if repeatedly exposing women with high self-disgust (N = 61) to disgust-focused body memories vs.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study explored the relationship between the effectiveness of exposure-based Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for adolescents with anxiety disorders and factors such as emotional processing and inhibitory learning during sessions.
  • The treatment involved 72 adolescents who participated in a two-week intensive program, and effectiveness was measured using anxiety ratings and goal-related progress, assessing both fear reduction and changes in threat expectancies.
  • Findings revealed a significant reduction in anxiety symptoms, with greater initial fear levels linked to better outcomes, while higher threat expectancies after exposure were associated with poorer progress, indicating the importance of both fear reduction and expectancy change in CBT.
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In a randomized controlled trial in the Netherlands, we studied the (cost)effectiveness of adding a mindful yoga intervention (MYI+TAU) to treatment as usual (TAU) for young women with major depressive disorder (MDD). In this paper, we present the results of the economic analyses. Societal costs and health outcomes were prospectively assessed during 15 months for all randomized participants (n = 171).

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Low meaning in life has been proposed as an important factor in the maintenance of eating disorders and previous findings suggest that targeting meaning might optimize treatment effectiveness. The current randomized controlled trial aimed to investigate the efficacy of meaning-centered psychotherapy adjusted for eating disorders (MCP-ED) to improve meaning in women with high weight and shape concerns. Female students with high weight and shape concerns (N = 134) were randomly assigned to the waiting-list control condition or the experimental condition, in which they followed six weekly individual sessions of MCP-ED.

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Background: Insomnia symptoms are common following bereavement and may exacerbate severe and protracted grief reactions, such as prolonged grief disorder (PGD). However, typical trajectories of insomnia symptoms and risk factors for having a more chronic insomnia trajectory following bereavement are yet unknown.

Method: In the current investigation, 220 recently bereaved (≤6 months post-loss) participants, completed questionnaires assessing sociodemographic and loss-related characteristics, rumination, experiential avoidance and symptoms of (prolonged) grief and depression, on three time-points (6 months apart).

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Background And Objectives: It has been proposed that negative mental imagery plays an important role in the persistence of social fears. Experiencing vivid and distressing 'flashforward' images of a potential social catastrophe appears to be of relevance in speech anxiety. To clarify the role of these images, the current experimental study tested if reducing the vividness and distressing properties of recurring negative flashforward images subsequently reduces anxiety and avoidance tendencies regarding a speech.

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Background And Objectives: Research that used counterconditioning (CC) to reduce women's negative body image has led to mixed results. One explanation could be that the negative responses elicited by own body pictures hinder the effectiveness of CC procedures in adjusting overly negative attitudes towards the own body. In this study we therefore tried to prevent the impact of negative responses by limiting women's perceptual awareness of the own body pictures during the CC procedure.

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The field of eating disorders is facing problems ranging from a suboptimal classification system to low long-term success rates of treatments. There is evidence supporting a transdiagnostic approach to explain the development and maintenance of eating disorders. Meaning in life has been proposed as a promising key transdiagnostic factor that could potentially not only bridge between the different eating disorder subtypes but also explain frequent co-occurrence with symptoms of comorbid psychopathology, such as anxiety and depression.

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We present a model of disgust-induced avoidant processing of autobiographical memories contributing to the persistence of psychopathology. Following the model, autobiographical memory retrieval is biased toward disgust-related experiences. Critically, disgust promotes the avoidance of specific autobiographical memories by reactively aborting the processing of those memories or by strategically preventing access to them, making disgust appraisals immune to corrective information.

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There is ample evidence showing that childhood maltreatment increases two to three fold the risk of victimization in adulthood. Various risk factors, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, dissociation, self-blame, and alcohol abuse are related to revictimization. Although previous research examined associations between risk factors for revictimization, the evidence is limited and the proposed models mostly include a handful of risk factors.

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Current models propose that inhibited sexual arousal is a key component in maintaining sexual pain in women with Genito-Pelvic Pain/Penetration Disorder. It thus follows that enhancing sexual arousal may be an effective strategy to modulate pain, but this effect has not been successfully demonstrated with women, although it has been successful with men. This study built on previous works and examined if the pain-killing effect of sexual arousal might have been undermined by concurrently-elicited disgust.

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Sleep problems are very common in individuals with a mental disorder. Given the abundant evidence indicating the negative impact of disturbed sleep on mental health outcome, insight into the prevalence of all types of sleep disorders in specific mental disorders and neurodevelopmental conditions is of practical importance. Therefore, we estimated the prevalence of six types of sleep disorders with the Holland Sleep Disorders Questionnaire in an overall mental health sample (n = 1082) and separately for different mental and neurodevelopmental conditions.

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Prolonged grief disorder, characterized by severe, persistent and disabling grief, has recently been added to the DSM-5-TR and ICD-11. Treatment for prolonged grief symptoms shows limited effectiveness. It has been suggested that prolonged grief symptoms exacerbate insomnia symptoms, whereas insomnia symptoms, in turn, may fuel prolonged grief symptoms.

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