ProgramME

Keynotes

Prof. Dr. Brenda Penninx

Stress in daily life

Stress is prevalent in our society, some recent studies even suggest stress-related mental disorders are increasing. Although persons generally can thrive under pressure, chronic stress exposure leads to mental and cardiometabolic disorders. From lab studies, we learned a lot about the mechanisms through which stressors cause adverse health conditions. These include a range of unfavorable stress responses: physiological (e.g. dysregulated stress systems), behavioral (e.g. unhealthy lifestyles), cognitive (e.g. rumination) and affective (e.g. negative affect). Nowadays, we can study these stress responses in an ecologically valid environment: daily life. Using ambulatory assessments such as wearables and active and passive sensing during extended time periods, we learn more about the types of stress exposures that are experienced. This also allows us to examine the relevance of extent, duration and recovery of stress responses after stress exposure, and how these relate to the onset of mental and cardiometabolic disorders. Examining stress in daily life the is the topic of the Stress in Action project (www.stress-in-action.nl), of which I will describe some first insights in the keynote lecture.

Prof. Dr. Brenda Penninx works at the department of Psychiatry of Amsterdam UMC, connected to the Vrije University in Amsterdam. She leads a research team of ~25 PhD-students, postdocs and assistant professors who examine the pathophysiology, course and consequences of stress and stress-related disorders. Penninx is principal investigator of the multi-site, longitudinal Netherlands Study of Depression and Anxiety (NESDA, www.nesda.nl), and of the national Stress in Action project (SiA, www.stress-in-action.nl). In 2016, Penninx was elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which she currently serves as vice-president. She also serves as president-elect of the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology.

Prof. Dr. Eiko Fried

Measuring minds in motion: pitfalls and promises of AA methods in mental health science

There is near-universal agreement today among both researchers and clinicians that mental health problems are dynamic processes emerging from biopsychosocial systems. This recognition dovetails with the rise of ambulatory assessment (AA) methods which have become indispensable: we cannot describe, predict, control, or explain dynamic processes in mental health research without measuring them in the first place. For this reason, AA has become widely adopted across mental health science and clinical practice and is here to stay. Despite major advances over the last decade, substantial challenges remain. These include participant burden and compliance; data quality of EMA and consumer-grade passive sensing data; frequency of assessments and challenges pertaining to timescales; the relation between EMA responses and passive sensing data; and aligning AA data collection with assumptions statistical models impose on time-series data. In this talk, I will discuss these challenges, with a focus on work we have done in our effort to build a personalized early warning system for depression in young adults.

Prof. Dr. Eiko Fried obtained his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the Free University of Berlin, followed by four years of postdoctoral training in methodology groups in Leuven and Amsterdam. As Professor of Mental Health and Data Science, he now works at the intersection between these fields in the Departments of Clinical Psychology as well as Methodology and Statistics at Leiden University. Eiko studies mental health problems as emergent properties that arise from dynamical, biopsychosocial systems, with core interests including how to best measure, model, understand, and classify them. The focus of his work in the last years has been the WARN-D study, developing a personalized early warning system for depression in young adults. You can find his blog, publications, and data at www.eiko-fried.com.

Early Career Award keynote – Dr. Daniel Coppersmith

Advancing the understanding and treatment of suicidal thoughts and behaviors with mobile technologies

Suicide is a leading cause of death. Despite immense prevention efforts, the suicide death rate has not declined in the United States over time. One potential reason suicide has remained so difficult to prevent is how difficult it is to measure suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs). Mobile technologies, such as smartphones, offer tools to measure STBs as they unfold in real-time. The real-time measurement of STBs provides an opportunity to advance the understanding and prevention of STBs. In this talk, I’ll demonstrate the unique insights mobile technologies can provide into STBs. Specific topics I’ll highlight will include the temporal dynamics of suicidal thinking, person-level models of suicide risk, and real-time digital interventions for suicide prevention. This talk will grapple with the both the promise and challenges of using mobile technologies to study and prevent suicide.

Dr. Daniel Coppersmith is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the director of the Suicide Prevention Research Laboratory. His research is grounded in the theoretical orientation that suicidal thoughts and behaviors are dynamic, complex, and heterogeneous and he use technologies, such as smartphones and wearable biosensors, to capture and model these factors. He earned his PhD in clinical psychology from Harvard University and completed his clinical internship at the VA Boston Healthcare System. His research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, and the American Psychological Foundation.