Main Research Projects

A strong story: A practice-based study on a narrative intervention for persons with personality disorders

Personality disorders are psychological disorders with a rigid and lasting pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that cause a lot of individual suffering and high societal costs. There is evidence that psychotherapy contributes to the clinical and functional recovery of personality disorders, also in the third-line mental health care. This does not imply, however, that there is also a personal and social recovery. A narrative approach offers opportunities to work in a personalized way on personal and social recovery. The approach makes a clear distinction between the person and the disorder shows that stories contribute to relationships, direction and meaning in life and deals with the unique story of people. A 'strong' story can reduce the chance of relapse and it to sustainably strengthen personal and social recovery. This project develops a narrative intervention that contributes to the personal and social recovery of people. An evidence-based psychological intervention requires an alignment of the best scientific knowledge with the clinical expertise of professionals and values and preferences of patients. That is why this project takes these three components into account right from the start. The use of the best scientific knowledge contributes to the development of an effective intervention. By involving practitioners in the process, the clinical expertise is made explicit and by giving experience experts a voice, the intervention can be tuned to their personal values and preferences. The first sub-goal is the design of the intervention. The second sub-goal is the early evaluation of the intervention. The overarching goal of this project is to create an implementation toolkit for a personalized narrative intervention that contributes to personal and social recovery of people with personality disorders.

Emotion recognition in dementia: Advancing technology for multimodal analysis of emotion expression in everyday life

Emotional expression plays a crucial role in everyday functioning. It is a continuous process involving many features of behavioral, facial, vocal, and verbal modalities. Given this complexity, few psychological studies have addressed emotion recognition in an everyday context. Recent technological innovations in affective computing could result in a scientific breakthrough as they open up new possibilities for the ecological assessment of emotions. However, existing technologies
still pose major challenges in the field of Big Data Analytics.  Little is known about how these lab-based technologies generalize to real world problems. Rather than a one-size-fits-all-solution, existing tools need to be adapted to specific user groups in more natural settings. They also need to take large individual differences into account. We take up these challenges by studying emotional expression in dementia. In this context, emotional functioning is strongly at risk, yet highly important to maintain quality of life in person-centered care. Our domain-specific goal is to gain a better understanding of how dementia affects emotion expression. We carry out a pilot study, a comparative study between Alzheimer patients and matched healthy older adults, as well as a longitudinal study on the development of emotion expression in Alzheimer patients across time. We develop a unique corpus, use state of the art machine learning techniques to advance technologies for multimodal emotion recognition, and develop visualization and statistical models to assess multimodal patterns of emotion expression. We test their usability in a workshop for international researchers and make them available through the eScience Technology Platform.

What works when for whom? Advancing therapy change process research by mining for therapy-related textual features in effective e-mental health interventions

Mental illnesses, like depression and anxiety, are among the leading causes of the global burden of disease. E-mental health (EMH) interventions, i.e., web-based psychotherapy treatments, are increasingly used to improve access to psychotherapy for a wider audience. Whereas different EMH interventions tend to be equally effective, the responsiveness to a specific treatment shows large individual differences. Therefore, the personalization of treatments is seen as the major road for improvement. Because most EMH interventions use language for communication between counselors and clients, assessing language use provides an important avenue for opening the black box of what happens within therapy. Moreover, EMH makes data of the linguistic interactions between client and counselor available on an unprecedented large scale. The objective of the study is to use e-science methods and tools, in particular natural language processing, visualization and multivariate analysis methods, to analyze patterns in therapy-related textual features in e-mail correspondence between counselor and client. By connecting these patterns to therapy outcome, the question What Works When for Whom? can be answered, which will greatly improve the effectiveness of EMH. The core of the project concerns the development of open source software for the Dutch language, using data from six EMH-interventions with a total of 10.000 e-mails. These data are sufficiently large and varied to allow for computer-based modelling, and testing of use cases with varying complexity. At the end of the project, the step toward English language software will be made to increase the impact of the project.

Online Life Story Books

At present, about 260.000 people with dementia live in the Netherlands. This number will double over the coming twenty years. Dementia has a high burden for patients, informal caregivers and society. About two thirds of persons with dementia is estimated to live at home, but this number will increase given changes in long-term care. However, living at home with a good quality of life is not easy to achieve. Dementia is often accompanied by neuropsychiatric symptoms like apathy, agitation, hallucinations, depression, and anxiety. This is also related to the quality of life of the patient. Whereas the cognitive deterioration can hardly be influenced, it is possible to reduce neuropsychiatric symptoms. A good fit with the personal world of the person with dementia is an important condition for interventions. Reminiscence interventions can contribute as the recollection of valuable personal memories can give feelings of pleasure and trust. Memories are part of the autobiographical memory system that remains intact for a relatively long time in dementia. The Online Life Story Book (OLSB) is an intervention that nicely ties in with these changes in care for persons with dementia. The current study therefore wants to assess the effectiveness of this intervention for people with early dementia and their informal caregivers.

Narrative Futuring to enhance well-being in precarious and complex worlds

This project develops theory, research and methodology for studying and enhancing well-being in precarious and complex worlds, based on future stories. It takes as point of departure that optimal human functioning in a sustainable way that simultaneously warrants and enhances flourishing of the environment is of the utmost importance. A narrative futuring approach, based on a future-forming epistemology and a social-constructivist methodology, is proposed as answer to this challenge. The urgency of the issue of flourishing comes from the recognition that flourishing is under pressure all over the world. In Europe, for example, the impact of the socio-economic crisis in the lives of many citizens is very real. Closer to home, the Western-European context of an apparent higher material welfare, does not guarantee optimal human functioning either. Of the manifold constraints to reaching full potential, our capacity to imagine believable and desirable future selves stands out as a historically and psychologically challenging concern. This capacity and its constraints, considered to be an interaction between cognitive capacity and environmental affordances (cultural, social, physical, educational etc.), is subject of investigation in several studies, e.g.:

1) Letters from the Future as decision aid prior to the Greek Referendum in 2015;

2) comparative study of unemployed and employed youth visualizing and reflecting on desired futures;

3) co-creating future stories by professionals and experiential experts envisioning a more humane care/justice system;

4) psychiatric patients in recovery projects imagining desired futures.

Machine-based mapping of innovation journeys

Commercial innovation is vital for the future of organisations. Especially to large and mature corporations, managing innovation has become a great challenge, involving large numbers of teams inside and outside organisational boundaries, operating in various timeframes. Our current understanding of innovation processes and how they can be managed does not adequately match today’s reality. In this study, we will develop new and more accurate complex innovation process models by exploiting advanced machine learning and data mining techniques, applied to the empirical textual data of a large number of cases over an extended period of time.

Life stories and personality disorder: An explorative study with implications for narrative interventions

In this research project several aspects of the relationship between life stories and personality disorders are being studied. In the first study, the clinicians view was used to develop a systematic evaluation method of life stories to support clinical decision-making on treatment assignment. In the second study, the patient perspective is studied in life stories, being personal narratives of patients that suffer from enduring dysfunctional patterns of behavior, cognition, and inner feelings they experience across many contexts. We value the patient perspective to learn more about this severe and often invaliding condition. Our interest lays especially in the meanings that are present in life stories of patients that seek help. In the third study, we conduct a study on relevant themes in life stories, and their change after intensive (day)clinical psychotherapeutic treatment. And in the fourth study, the implications are discussed of the last two studies for developing narrative interventions supporting patients in creating a healthy narrative that allows for personal growth.   

Wonderful life: a novel, appreciative intervention to elicit meaning in life

Experiencing meaning in life is crucial to well-being. In this study, we focus on those extraordinary moments in life when meaning manifests itself spontaneously: when we suddenly feel a powerful, affirmative connection to existence. Narratives of these wonderful moments in life are collected by using a question derived from the Japanese movie ‘After Life’: ‘What if there is an afterlife. There, all your memories will be erased, except for one. Which memory do you choose to take with you to eternity?’. Insights from these narratives are used to develop an intervention that helps to establish our connection to meaning in daily life.

Developing a professional identity through autobiographical reflection with the use of persuasive technology

The profession of social worker is quickly changing now hat it entails less the solution of clients but the support of autonomy, strengths and social contacts of clients. Reflection on core aspects of their first professional experiences helps students in social work to develop a professional identity. This project assesses whether adding autobiographical reflection in the sense of a review of one’s personal life strengthens the development of a professional identity. Furthermore, the study assesses whether a blended e-learning using persuasive technology supports the process.

Images of recovery: A visual-narrative study exploring the concept of personal recovery in mental health

Recovery oriented care has become a guiding principle within mental health.  This qualitative research project focusses on the exploration of personal recovery on both people with lived experiences of mental illness and mental health professionals. The first group is often unheard and marginalized in society. A visual-narrative approach via PhotoVoice methodology is applied to empower their voice and make recovery tangible. Views on recovery by a second group of professionals are then compared to gain insight if both groups are speaking the same language when it comes to personal recovery and how this influences a recovery oriented mental health.

Who am I? A life story intervention for persons with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric problems  

 “Who am I?” is a life story intervention that was is developed for persons with intellectual disabilities and psychiatric problems. The intervention builds on insights from narrative therapy and life review therapy. A first evaluation has shown that the intervention is well accepted by clients and that their complaints reduce during the intervention. Further research will contribute to the theoretical foundation of the intervention and effects on positive functioning besides effects on psychiatric problems. Furthermore, qualitative analyses of course books as well as several n=1 studies are planned.

Resistance to crime: an exploration on ‘not doing crime’ based on life stories of resisters

Narrative criminological research is primarily focused on people with a criminal career or those who desist from it. Research on people who do not have a criminal career is largely neglected. This exploratory qualitative research focuses on so-called ‘resisters’; people who are subjected to and/or grew up in a dominantly criminal environment, but did not develop a criminal career. Life stories of resisters are analysed, based on a narrative approach in order to gain meaningful insights into resistance to crime.