Publications by authors named "Heleen Riper"

Objectives: In this unified series of meta-analyses, we integrate the effects of digital interventions in adults with mental disorders compared to inactive controls. We cover eight indications: depressive disorder, insomnia, specific phobias, generalized anxiety, panic, social anxiety, obsessive-compulsive, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Methods: Digital intervention trials in patients with a diagnosed mental disorder (confirmed by clinical interviews) were extracted from the Metapsy living databases for psychological treatments.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Early detection of elevated acute stress is necessary if we aim to reduce consequences associated with prolonged or recurrent stress exposure. Stress monitoring may be supported by valid and reliable machine-learning algorithms. However, investigation of algorithms detecting stress severity on a continuous scale is missing due to high demands on data quality for such analyses.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Autistic adults experience more daily stress compared to non-autistic adults. However, stress recognition is often delayed, potentially leading to chronic stress and significant (mental) health risks. We evaluated the effectiveness of Stress Autism Mate (SAM), a stress-monitoring mobile health application co-created with autistic individuals.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The scientific output generated in psychology has surged in recent decades, including the number of studies investigating psychological treatments. To keep track of all this evidence, we developed the "Metapsy" meta-analytic research domain: a comprehensive system of open databases and tailored software that allows for rapid evidence generation. We leverage this novel infrastructure to summarize the effect of psychological treatment across 12 mental health problems and trace back the global expansion of psychotherapy research over the past 50 years.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Previous meta-analyses have integrated evidence on the effects of transdiagnostic interventions for depression and anxiety symptoms. Nevertheless, no recent study covers all types of transdiagnostic interventions administered through a wide range of delivery formats, and targeting participants with different emotional disorders (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Importance: Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is a first-line treatment for most mental disorders. However, no meta-analytic study has yet integrated the results of randomized clinical trials on CBT across different disorders, using uniform methodologies and providing a complete overview of the field.

Objective: To examine the effect sizes of CBT for 4 anxiety disorders, 2 eating disorders, major depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and psychotic and bipolar disorders on symptoms of the respective disorders using uniform methodologies for data extraction, risk of bias (RoB) assessment, and meta-analytic techniques.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions (JITAIs) are interventions designed to deliver timely tailored support by adjusting to changes in users' internal states and external contexts. To accomplish this, JITAIs often apply complex analytic techniques, such as machine learning or Bayesian algorithms to real- or near-time data acquired from smartphones and other sensors. Given the idiosyncratic, dynamic, and context dependent nature of mental health symptoms, JITAIs hold promise for mental health.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aimed to evaluate a guided internet- and smartphone-based gratitude intervention’s effectiveness in reducing repetitive negative thinking among adults, focusing on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral aspects of gratitude.
  • Participants (200 adults) were randomly assigned to either receive the gratitude intervention over four sessions or join a control waiting list, with their repetitive negative thinking assessed at three months, and additional evaluations at six weeks and six months.
  • Results showed that those who completed the gratitude intervention reported significantly lower levels of repetitive negative thinking and improvements in depression and anxiety symptoms, suggesting that gratitude-focused interventions could be a beneficial approach for managing these issues.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Acceptance of health care professionals is of paramount importance for the uptake and implementation of eHealth. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model is a widely used framework for studying health care professionals' acceptance and actual use of eHealth among general client populations. However, there is limited understanding of the eHealth acceptance of health care professionals working with people with intellectual disabilities (ID).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the cost-effectiveness of a digital stress management intervention for employees versus a waitlist control group over six months, focusing on health costs and productivity losses.
  • - Results indicate that the intervention is likely to be cost-effective from both societal and employer perspectives, with a high probability of being dominant and providing a positive return on investment.
  • - Overall, the findings suggest that digital stress management programs not only improve employee wellbeing but also offer economic benefits, making them a worthwhile investment for employers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Sleep problems like insomnia are common in autistic adults, affecting around 60% and dramatically reducing their quality of life; tailored treatments like internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (iCBT-I) may offer a solution.
  • * This study will involve 160 autistic adults diagnosed with insomnia to test the effectiveness of a new guided iCBT-I intervention specifically designed for them, called i-Sleep Autism, over a six-week period, comparing results against a waitlist control group.
  • * The trial will measure various outcomes including insomnia severity, mental health, and quality of life at multiple points, helping to determine if this intervention is beneficial for the target population.*
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Evidence shows that online interventions could prevent depression. However, to improve the effectiveness of preventive online interventions in individuals with subthreshold depression, it is worthwhile to study factors influencing intervention outcomes. Outcome expectancy has been shown to predict treatment outcomes in psychotherapy for depression.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

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 program (human-guided and computer-guided iCBT) over care as usual (CAU) in a large sample of university students and the superiority of human-guided iCBT over computer-guided iCBT.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Research indicates that machine learning (ML) algorithms utilizing natural behavior data (like text, audio, and video) could enhance personalization in psychology and psychiatry, but there's a lack of a comprehensive review on this topic.
  • The systematic review analyzed 128 studies, predominantly focusing on predicting anxiety (87 studies) and posttraumatic stress disorder (41 studies), mostly published since 2019 in computer science journals, with a greater emphasis on text data.
  • While many studies showed promising predictive power, significant variations in quality and reporting standards exist, and further standardization and research in clinical settings are needed for effective application in mental health diagnostics.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the impact of blended cognitive behavioral therapy (bCBT) on the working alliance and clinical outcomes in treating depression, comparing it to usual treatment (TAU).
  • Researchers analyzed data from the E-COMPARED trial involving 943 participants across Europe to evaluate working alliance scores and depression severity after 3 months.
  • Key findings include potential differences in working alliance between bCBT and TAU, and the relationship between system usability and working alliance within the bCBT group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: It is not clear whether the amount and frequency of psychotherapy is associated with treatment effects for adult depression. We investigated whether a number of indicators of the amount and frequency of psychotherapy were related to the treatment effects in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing individual, face-to-face psychotherapy to a control group (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Psychotherapies are first-line treatments for most mental disorders, but their absolute outcomes (i.e., response and remission rates) are not well studied, despite the relevance of such information for health care users, providers and policy makers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is highly prevalent and burdensome for individuals and society. While there are psychological interventions able to prevent and treat MDD, uptake remains low. To overcome structural and attitudinal barriers, an indirect approach of using online insomnia interventions seems promising because insomnia is less stigmatized, predicts MDD onset, is often comorbid and can outlast MDD treatment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Temstem is a smartphone app developed with and for clinical voice hearing individuals with the aim to reduce their voice hearing distress and improve social functioning.

Methods: A randomized controlled trial with adult outpatients suffering from distressing and frequent auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) was conducted. Participants were randomized to unguided 'Temstem+AVH monitoring' or unguided 'AVH monitoring only' (control condition).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: A growing body of literature indicates that adolescent girls who talk with close friends about interpersonal problems or worries in an excessive, speculative way, and with an intense focus on distress (i.e., co-rumination) are at heightened risk for developing internalizing symptoms and disorders as well as reduced friendship quality.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

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-tailored intervention features, such as optional modules, has not yet been explored.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Objectives: Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a global health problem. Although effective treatments for it exist, early interventions that prevent PTSD from developing are lacking. The aim of this pilot analogue trauma study was to compare the effects of two potential early intervention strategies, namely Tetris_dualtask and imagery rescripting (IR) to a no-intervention control group on intrusion frequency and the vividness and emotionality of aversive film memory.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF