When tiredness creeps into your mind: Cognitive bias Modification targeting fatigue in cancer patients
Method Stream: Longitudinal Intensive Methods
ECs Only 14 EC (standard, no or limited own data collection. Applicable in case of a clinical internship)
Description:
A growing body of research shows that automatic and unconscious mental processes, so-called cognitive biases, play a causal role in health-related behaviors (healthy food, alcohol abuse), in somatic disease symptoms like chronic fatigue, and in mental health disorders. Traditional psychosocial interventions, however, do not target these cognitive biases. Computer-mediated techniques, Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM), have recently emerged that can correct these maladaptive biases with simple repetitive association tasks.
CBM techniques have been developed for different cognitive biases related to fatigue, including attentional bias (Att-CBM), self-identity bias (SI-CBM; Geerts 2023; Wolbers 2021), and interpretation bias (CBM-I).
In this thesis project, we will work with an existing dataset collected in a recent PhD project of Jody Geerts at the section of PHT at the UT (Geerts et al., 2026). In this project a controlled trial was conducted to test feasibility and effectiveness of a novel CBM intervention, the IVY-app. The IVY app is built in the TIIM app, powered by the BMS Lab. Results showed that the IVY app can mitigate the self-identity bias from fatigue towards a more vitality oriented self. However, no evidence was found of this translating into experiencing les fatigue or more vitality.
We will perform secondary data-analyses in this dataset to explore the following two research questions:
1) Do cancer patients with poor mental health benefit more from the CBM treatment? As a measure of depressive symptoms was taken at pre and post, we can test a moderating or mediating role of mental health in the effect of CBM on fatigue;
2) Is the effect of the IVY CBM app on the self-identity bias mainly explained by a stronger vitality-orientation, or rather a weakened fatigue-orientation?
References
Jones & Sharpe, 2017
Leung et al., 2022
Kakoschke et al., 2017
Martinelli et al., 2022
Prior studies in our group on fatigue CBM:
Wolbers et al., 2021 , Geerts et al., 2023, Geerts et al., 2026