Publications
Depression in middle childhood: secure base script as a cognitive diathesis in the relationship between daily stress and depressive symptoms KU Leuven
A better understanding of protective factors against childhood depression may allow for the mitigation of severe and chronic symptoms and the timely implementation of intervention strategies. This study investigated the protective effect of having a secure base script on depressive symptoms when children face daily stressors. To test this hypothesis, moderation analyses were performed in a cross-sectional study with 378 children (48.5% boys, ...
Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU) Factor Structure and Measurement Invariance in an Adolescent Multinational Sample KU Leuven
OBJECTIVE: The Inventory of Callous-Unemotional Traits (ICU) is a widely used, comprehensive measure of callous-unemotional (CU) traits. While the ICU total score is used frequently in research, the scale's factor structure remains highly debated. Inconsistencies in past factor structure research appear to be largely due to the use of small non-representative samples and failure to control for method variance (i.e., item wording direction). ...
Changes in adolescent loneliness and concomitant changes in fear of negative evaluation and self-esteem KU Leuven
Current theories of loneliness posit that biases in social information processing play a key role in the development and maintenance of loneliness. However, this assumption has rarely been tested in longitudinal research in adolescence. The current study concentrated on two constructs associated with such biases, that is, fear of negative evaluation and self-esteem. More specifically, we examined whether changes in loneliness were associated ...
Problem Talk in Adolescence: Temperament and Attachment as Predictors of Co-Rumination Trajectories in Boys and Girls KU Leuven
Co-rumination has consistently been shown to be maladaptive in the context of emotional well-being. However, not much is known about factors that predict one's tendency to co-ruminate. The current study investigated temperament, attachment, and gender as predictors of co-rumination trajectories in a sample of 1549 early and middle adolescents from fifth to ninth grade (53.4% girls; Mage = 12.93). Analyses were performed on four waves of data ...