IEPA 11

Psychopathological symptoms are natural experiences emerging in the realm of ordinary daily life, often in interaction with contextual factors. In the mental health field, there is a growing awareness that the study of these symptoms in the context of everyday life, using Experience Sampling Methodology, may provide a powerful and necessary addition to more conventional research approaches. In my talk, I will work out two examples to demonstrate how using ESM may help in deepening our understanding of the actual processes related to the onset of symptoms as well as in improving interventions at an early stage.

In the first part of my talk, I will focus on the capacity for social interaction as an important factor in the development of psychopathology in adolescence. I will report data of the SIGMA study, an ongoing large-scale study currently including over a thousand adolescents, where we used both Experience Sampling Methodology to examine real-life social interactions and experimental and questionnaire measures of social capacity and attunement to examine how these relate to early symptoms.
In the second part of my talk, I will discuss whether real-life interventions may provide an acceptable and feasible tool for patients at the early stages of psychotic disorder. I will present the first results of the INTERACT study, a randomized clinical trial of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in Daily Life in 150 individuals with an At Risk Mental state for psychosis or in a first episode of psychosis.