Assistant Professor at the Developmental Psychopathology Department, mainly interested in general processes and principles of clinical change; mother of two wild boys.
I am born in the southern part of Germany and moved all the way up to the northern part of the Netherlands to study psychology in Groningen. I received my PhD from the University of Groningen at the department of Developmental Psychology in 2008. Currently, I am working as an assistant professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the research program Developmental Psychopathology. Generally, I am not so interested in whether certain interventions work but how they work. That is, I am mainly focusing on underlying processes and mechanisms of change across diagnostic categories and different treatment modalities. Eventually I hope that by understanding individual processes of change we will be able to personalize and tailor treatments to the specific needs of clients. My interest in game interventions is mainly driven by the fact that they allow us to gather fine-grained data on how individuals change across game play. Moreover, I find it inspiring to work with game developers. Although coming from very different backgrounds the linking pin for me is the explicit translation of a theory about how humans behave and change into mechanisms (or game mechanics).
Commercial video games may offer a cheap and readily available way to help us understand in what way video games can be used to promote adolescent well-being. Excellent targets for this are games that involve social interaction, encourage both positive and negative emotions and are identified by youth themselves as potentially beneficial. By letting youth play several commercial video games in different settings, we can learn how games interact with well-being and motivation in both short and long-term.
The video game MindLight has been found to be an effective anxiety prevention program (see project: MindLight - Childhood Anxiety Prevention). However, we don’t know whether the clinical techniques incorporated in the game were responsible for the observed changes in anxiety symptoms. In this project we examined how children play MindLight, to what extent they interact with the clinical techniques in the game and how that relates to their anxiety improvements.
Many children have difficulties with fearful situations and are anxious. Interventions can help to teach children to cope effectively with anxiety-inducing situations. In our project, we rigorously tested whether an intervention in the form of a video game (MindLight) is effective in significantly reducing anxiety symptoms in children 8-12 years old. We did this by comparing MindLight to 1) a commercial game and 2) the gold-standard, cognitive-behavioural therapy for anxiety (Coping Cat). Furthermore, we evaluated the motivational characteristics of MindLight and for whom (e.g., age and gender differences) it is effective.
More and more games are designed to promote mental health. If these games are found to be effective, it is important to investigate which factors are responsible for the improvements in mental health. Most often, this type of research focuses on the specific clinical techniques that were designed into the game. However, from the clinical literature it is known that, for instance, expectations, motivation, and one’s mindset about the malleability of symptoms play a major role in positive intervention outcomes. In my project I aim to investigate these nonspecific factors and examine how we can manipulate these factors in order to optimize video games for mental health.
Social media are immensely popular, and - as it happens - a dense source of social information. In this project, we investigate what sort of information and experiences young people encounter on these social media, and how these things relate to their mental wellbeing, as well as how young people's momentary wellbeing relates to their social media behaviours.
Poppelaars, M., Tak, Y. R., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Engels, R. C. M. E., Lobel, A., Merry, S. N., Lucassen, M. F. G., & Granic, I. (2016). Behaviour Research and Therapy, 80, 33-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2016.03.005
Author: Marlou Poppelaars
Upload date: 05-01-2016
Granic, I., Lobel, A., Poppelaars, M., & Engels, R. C. M. E. (2015). Kind en Adolescent, 36 (1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12453-014-0066-8
Author: Marlou Poppelaars
Upload date: 01-22-2015
Poppelaars, M., Tak, Y. R., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Engels, R. C. M. E., Lobel, A., Merry, S. N., Lucassen, M. F. G., & Granic, I. (2014). In Schouten, B., Fedtke, S., Schijven, M., Vosmeer, M. & Gekker, A. (Eds.), Games for Health 2014 (pp. 125-135). Germany: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-07141-7_17
Author: Marlou Poppelaars
Upload date: 10-29-2014
Griffioen, N., Scholten, H., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A. et al. (2021). Humanit Soc Sci Commun 8, 177. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00863-1
Author: Nastasia Griffioen
Upload date: 07-20-2021
Wols, A., Poppelaars, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2020). Entertainment Computing, 100371.
Author: Aniek Wols
Upload date: 07-07-2020
Schoneveld, E.A., Wols, A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Otten, R., & Granic I. (2020). Journal of Child and Family Studies. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-020-01728-y
Author: Elke Schoneveld
Upload date: 06-24-2020
Bossenbroek, R., Wols, A., Weerdmeester, J., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Granic, I., & van Rooij, M. (2020). JMIR Mental Health, 7(3), e16066. http://dx.doi.org/10.2196/16066
Author: Aniek Wols
Upload date: 03-24-2020
Griffioen, N., Van Rooij, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2020). J Med Internet Res 2020;22(1):e15529.
Author: Nastasia Griffioen
Upload date: 01-28-2020
Wols, A., Hollenstein, T., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2019). https://osf.io/6gmwv
Author: Aniek Wols
Upload date: 07-05-2019
Schoneveld, E. A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2019). Entertainment Computing, 29, 69-74.
Author: Elke Schoneveld
Upload date: 03-01-2019
Poppelaars, M., Wols, A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2018). Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01837
Author: Marlou Poppelaars
Upload date: 09-10-2018
Poppelaars, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Kleinjan, M., & Granic, I. (2018). The impact of explicit mental health messages in video games on players’ motivation and affect. Computers in Human Behavior, 83, 16-23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.01.019
Author: Marlou Poppelaars
Upload date: 07-01-2018
Wols, A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Schoneveld, E. A., & Granic, I. (2018). Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 40, 655-668. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-018-9684-4
Author: Aniek Wols
Upload date: 06-11-2018
Schoneveld, E. A., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic, I. (2017). Prevention Science, 1-13.
Author: Elke Schoneveld
Upload date: 09-27-2017
Schoneveld, E. A., Malmberg, M., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., Verheijen, G. P., Engels, R. C., & Granic, I. (2016). Computers in Human Behavior, 63, 321-333.
Author: Elke Schoneveld
Upload date: 10-01-2016
Wols, A., Hollenstein, T., Lichtwarck-Aschoff, A., & Granic (2021). Games for Health, 10(4), 207-219.
Author: Aniek Wols
Upload date: 08-09-2021