What are the circadian disturbances underlying depression vulnerability? How are they related to mood, cognition and sleep ?

Our mission is to improve the description, prediction, understanding and the prevention and treatment of mood disorders, including unipolar and bipolar depression, as well as suicidal thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. To tackle this ambitious mission, we focus on several research streams.

Optimization, mechanisms of action and predictors of the outcome of light therapy in depression: A multicenter randomized trial

The Leiden Index of Depression Sensitivity (LEIDS) measures cognitive reactivity (CR) to sadness, an aspect of cognitive vulnerability to depression, conceptually similar to rumination.

PhD defence

How do genetic and environmental factors make us vulnerable to depression?

To investigate the effectiveness of an online self-help programme for people with HIV and depressive symptoms.

What are the social and neural mechanisms that contribute to fluctuations in self-esteem in healthy adolescents and adolescents with depression?

My ERC Starting Grant, funded with €1.5 million for 5 years as part of the Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, is focused on building the early warning system WARN-D to reliably forecast depression in young adults before it occurs. Why depression, and why prediction?

I want to understand the overlap between physical health, mental health, and healthy aging and whether/how stress (behaviorally and biologically) may tie these concepts together.

We found that, next to the effectiveness of the intervention, it’s also very likely that the intervention is cost-effective compared to attention only.

Some people are more sensitive to depression than others. But why is that the case? Clinical psychologist Niki Antypa studied how vulnerability to depression is influenced by cognition. She also found a first careful indication that a treatment with omega-3 fatty acids might provide a solution.

What is the effectiveness of (booklet or online) self-help programmes for people with somatic stressors and depressive symptoms? What works best for whom? How to improve motivation and adherence?

Depression has traditionally been linked to increased inflammation. Innovative research by psychologist Eiko Fried refutes this popular assumption. He shows that specific depression symptoms such as sleeping problems explain this relationship. Publication in Psychological Medicine .

Evidence that the right diet can prevent or alleviate depression is weak. In literature reviews on the subject, the authors often reach strong conclusions, nonetheless. This is what Florian Thomas-Odenthal, a master’s student in Psychology at Leiden University, discovered in his thesis research. Publication…

Teens with depression appear to be more sensitive to criticism from their parents than their healthy peers are.

What causes depression in a child and how can they get over it? Leiden Professor of Psychology Bernet Elzinga and behavioural scientist Carine Kielstra recently hosted a webinar on the subject of depression in teenagers. The level of interest was overwhelming.

Many primary school children suffer from anxiety and their numbers are increasing. Psychologists from the Knowledge Center Anxiety & Stress (KAS) are developing and researching preventive training.

With a starting grant of the European Research Council (ERC) for promising young researchers, Eiko Fried aims to develop a personalised early warning system, that will reliably forecast depression before it occurs. Fried (Clinical Psychology) talks about this WARN-D, promising to radically transform…

Personality is genetic in zebrafish: risk-taking parents have risk-taking children. These are the findings of research by Christian Tudorache and his team published in BMC Neuroscience.

Eye contact between parents and children improves their mood and increases feelings of connectedness on both sides; but not in the case of depressed adolescents, Mirjam Wever discovered. Where the parent-child bond has been disrupted, it can be strengthened not only with therapy for the child but also…

What role do parent-child interactions play in the development, maintenance and treatment of depression in young people?

The aim of this project is to investigate the (cost)effectiveness of two innovative forms of trauma-focused therapy for patients with childhood abuse related PTSD. The ultimate goal is to improve quality of care and contribute to treatment innovation for this severely ill target population.

Adolescents with good friendships experience fewer anxiety and depression symptoms, PhD student Iris Koele discovered in her research on high school students' social relationships. 'As a psychologist, I include friends in the treatment plan: who do you call when things are not going well?'

People who have taken antibiotics in the past three months pay more attention to negative facial expressions, according to research by postdoc Katerina Johnson and assistant professor Laura Steenbergen. This may explain how antibiotics increase the risk of developing depression.

The aim of our research program is to better understand the etiology and course of mood, anxiety and stress-related disorders, such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We investigate both the transdiagnostic mechanisms underlying these disorders and work on improving the treatments…

Predictors of work functioning in persons with multiple sclerosis

A restless night aggravates symptoms in those experiencing suicidal thoughts, as psychologists Liia Kivelä and Niki Antypa have found in their study on the short-term risk factors of suicide. They argue that targeting sleep could thus be essential for suicide prevention.

Imagine how much time, money and discomfort it would save: a personalised treatment for each individual patient. Precision medicine like this is coming ever closer, thanks in part to Elise Dusseldorp’s algorithms. They retrieve a wealth of information from research data.

People already diagnosed with a mental disorder before the COVID-19 pandemic did not show a disproportionate increase in symptoms afterwards. This is one result from the first systematic review of longitudinal studies following their study population from before to during the first eighteen months of…

PhD defence

PhD defence

CERQ is a questionnaire measuring cognitive coping strategies developed by Dr. Nadia Garnefski and Dr. Vivian Kraaij.

ADHD & ME aims to explore how enhancing self-esteem can break the relation between ADHD symptoms and comorbid disorders, such as anxiety and depression. In this study we assess the effectiveness of a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) program called Competitive Memory Training (COMET) for improving…

Positive friendships are characterised by understanding mutual wishes and intentions, respect for each other’s boundaries and pro-social behaviour. Qualities that might be more challenging for autistic adolescents.

Disclaimer: Manuscripts related to the Resilience Center are for academic purposes only and are not intended for mass distribution or copying. Please refer to applicable laws for fair use, including copyright holders' restrictions on publications.

This is an Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility project of the Faculty of Social and Behavoriural Sciences with Macquarie University in Australia.