HowNutsAreTheDutch

Last updated
HowNutsAreTheDutch
Available inDutch
OwnerUniversity of Groningen
Created byHowNutsAreTheDutch
URL
CommercialNo
RegistrationRequired
LaunchedDecember 13, 2013
Current status14000 members

"How Nuts Are The Dutch" is an online research platform that became established on 13 December 2013 in the Netherlands. [1] HowNutsAreTheDutch has been designed by researchers from the University of Groningen to support self-measurement of mental health for the entire population of The Netherlands. The project shows how crowdsourcing can be used for studying mental health in the general population. HowNutsAreTheDutch (HoeGekIsNL in Dutch) provides automatic personalized feedback on filled-out questionnaires to provide participants with more basic insight in their mental health, including a comparison with the scores of other participants. HowNutsAreTheDutch is meant to reduce mental health stigma and to promote a discrete categorization of mental health, by showing that all people have both personal strengths and weaknesses, and that most psychological characteristics are distributed continuously in the population. [2] [3] A background goal is to develop and evaluate personalized interventions to improve mood-related problems and social-emotional functioning. [4] In the first year 13000 inhabitants of the Netherlands and Belgium participated. [3]

Contents

Background

The HowNutsAreTheDutch name has been reported to be inspired by the Pandora foundation. [1] The Pandora foundation was a Dutch patient organization for people with mental health problems, which used posters with tongue-in-cheek sayings to inform the public and reduce mental health stigma. [5] The HowNutsAreTheDutch project was created by scientists from different fields, including computer sciences, psychiatric epidemiology, psychology, and mathematics. [6]

Diary Study

Since the summer of 2014 HowNutsAreTheDutch provides an automated electronic diary study. This is also known as the ecological momentary assessment methodology. [7] With this diary study participants can monitor their emotions, behaviour, somatic symptoms, and well-being over 30 days (3 times a day), which results in a personal network model. [8] There is no financial compensation for taking part in the research; instead, if participants fill in the diary often enough they get a personal, automatically generated report in return. [6] The web-platform uses automated vector autoregression models to determine cause-effect relationships between the measured features in the time series data. [9] Results evidence substantial between-person variability in within-person associations. [8] The diary study featured in the Dutch magazine "Psychologie" as a Quantified Self tool. [10] Some researchers coupled data from commercially available sensors (i.e., their Apple Watch, Google Fit, Jawbone, NikeFuel, or Misfit) to their HowNutsAreTheDutch diary data to study the interaction between their physical and psychological processes. [11]

One study showed that positive affect and prosocial actions reinforce each other; Thus when an individual was feeling good in one six-hour period, they were more likely to do something prosocial in the next six hours, and vice versa, in line with the mood maintenance theory. [12] Another study showed that negative affect predicted most differences in somatic symptoms between subjects, whereas positive affect predicted most variations in symptom levels within subjects. [13] An increase in positive affect was followed by a decrease in somatic symptoms in the following 24 hours.

Psychopathology

Psychological problems like major depression can be seen as complex dynamic systems in which symptom activation patterns can change suddenly (phase transitions). [14] Researchers showed that people from the general Dutch population were not susceptible to these transitions whereas someone who had experienced a depression was, using mean field approximation. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anxiety</span> Unpleasant state of inner turmoil over anticipated events

Anxiety is an emotion which is characterised by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different from fear in that fear is defined as the emotional response to a present threat, whereas anxiety is the anticipation of a future one. It is often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination.

Quality of life (QOL) is defined by the World Health Organization as "an individual's perception of their position in life in the context of the culture and value systems in which they live and in relation to their goals, expectations, standards and concerns".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hypochondriasis</span> Medical condition

Hypochondriasis or hypochondria is a condition in which a person is excessively and unduly worried about having a serious illness. Hypochondria is an old concept whose meaning has repeatedly changed over its lifespan. It has been claimed that this debilitating condition results from an inaccurate perception of the condition of body or mind despite the absence of an actual medical diagnosis. An individual with hypochondriasis is known as a hypochondriac. Hypochondriacs become unduly alarmed about any physical or psychological symptoms they detect, no matter how minor the symptom may be, and are convinced that they have, or are about to be diagnosed with, a serious illness.

Psychopathology is the study of mental illness. It includes the signs and symptoms of all mental disorders. The field includes abnormal cognition, maladaptive behavior, and experiences which differ according to social norms. This discipline is an in-depth look into symptoms, behaviors, causes, course, development, categorization, treatments, strategies, and more.

Psychological trauma is an emotional response caused by severe distressing events that are outside the normal range of human experiences. It must be understood by the affected person as directly threatening the affected person or their loved ones with death, severe bodily injury, or sexual violence; indirect exposure, such as from watching television news, may be extremely distressing and can produce an involuntary and possibly overwhelming physiological stress response, but does not produce trauma per se. Examples include violence, rape, or a terrorist attack.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Depression (mood)</span> State of low mood and aversion to activity

Depression is a mental state of low mood and aversion to activity. It affects about 3.5% of the global population, or about 280 million people of all ages. Depression affects a person's thoughts, behavior, feelings, and sense of well-being. Experiences that would normally bring a person pleasure or joy give reduced pleasure or joy, and the afflicted person often experiences a loss of motivation or interest in those activities.

A longitudinal study is a research design that involves repeated observations of the same variables over long periods of time. It is often a type of observational study, although it can also be structured as longitudinal randomized experiment.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Crowdsourcing</span> Sourcing services or funds from a group

Crowdsourcing involves a large group of dispersed participants contributing or producing goods or services—including ideas, votes, micro-tasks, and finances—for payment or as volunteers. Contemporary crowdsourcing often involves digital platforms to attract and divide work between participants to achieve a cumulative result. Crowdsourcing is not limited to online activity, however, and there are various historical examples of crowdsourcing. The word crowdsourcing is a portmanteau of "crowd" and "outsourcing". In contrast to outsourcing, crowdsourcing usually involves less specific and more public groups of participants.

Somatic psychology or, more precisely, "somatic clinical psychotherapy" is a form of psychotherapy that focuses on somatic experience, including therapeutic and holistic approaches to the body. It seeks to explore and heal mental and physical injury and trauma through body awareness and movement. Wilhelm Reich was first to try to develop a clear psychodynamic approach that included the body.

Somatization is a tendency to experience and communicate psychological distress as bodily and organic symptoms and to seek medical help for them. More commonly expressed, it is the generation of physical symptoms of a psychiatric condition such as anxiety. The term somatization was introduced by Wilhelm Stekel in 1924.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Psychiatry</span> Branch of medicine devoted to mental disorders

Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of deleterious mental conditions. These include various matters related to mood, behaviour, cognition, perceptions, and emotions.

The experience sampling method (ESM), also referred to as a daily diary method, or ecological momentary assessment (EMA), is an intensive longitudinal research methodology that involves asking participants to report on their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and/or environment on multiple occasions over time. Participants report on their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and/or environment in the moment or shortly thereafter. Participants can be given a journal with many identical pages. Each page can have a psychometric scale, open-ended questions, or anything else used to assess their condition in that place and time. ESM studies can also operate fully automatized on portable electronic devices or via the internet. The experience sampling method was developed by Suzanne Prescott during doctoral work at University of Chicago's Committee on Human Development with assistance from her dissertation advisor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Early studies that used ESM were coauthored by fellow students Reed W. Larson and Ronald Graef, whose dissertations both used the method.

A depression rating scale is a psychometric instrument (tool), usually a questionnaire whose wording has been validated with experimental evidence, having descriptive words and phrases that indicate the severity of depression for a time period. When used, an observer may make judgements and rate a person at a specified scale level with respect to identified characteristics. Rather than being used to diagnose depression, a depression rating scale may be used to assign a score to a person's behaviour where that score may be used to determine whether that person should be evaluated more thoroughly for a depressive disorder diagnosis. Several rating scales are used for this purpose.

Functional disorders are a group of recognisable medical conditions which are due to changes to the functioning of the systems of the body rather than due to a disease affecting the structure of the body.

Somatic symptom disorder, also known as somatoform disorder, or somatization disorder, is defined by one or more chronic physical symptoms that coincide with excessive and maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors connected to those symptoms. The symptoms are not deliberately produced or feigned, and they may or may not coexist with a known medical ailment.

The Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ) is a multiple-choice self-report inventory that is used as a screening and diagnostic tool for mental health disorders of depression, anxiety, alcohol, eating, and somatoform disorders. It is the self-report version of the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD), a diagnostic tool developed in the mid-1990s by Pfizer Inc. The length of the original assessment limited its feasibility; consequently, a shorter version, consisting of 11 multi-part questions - the Patient Health Questionnaire was developed and validated.

Subjective well-being (SWB) is a self-reported measure of well-being, typically obtained by questionnaire.

Event sampling methodology (ESM) refers to a diary study. ESM is also known as ecological momentary assessment (EMA) or experience sampling methodology. ESM includes sampling methods that allow researchers to study ongoing experiences and events by taking assessments one or more times per day per participant (n=1) in the naturally occurring social environment. ESM enables researchers to study the prevalence of behaviors, promote theory development, and to serve an exploratory role. The frequent sampling of events inherent in ESM enables researchers to measure the typology of activity and detect the temporal and dynamic fluctuations of experiences. The popularity of ESM as a new form of research design increased over the recent years, because it addresses the shortcomings of cross-sectional research which cannot detect intra-individual variances and processes across time and cause-effect relationships. In ESM, participants are asked to record their experiences and perceptions in a paper or electronic diary. Diary studies allow for the studying of events that occur naturally but are difficult to examine in the lab. For conducting event sampling, SurveySignal and Expimetrics. are becoming popular platforms for social science researchers.

The Somatic Symptom Scale - 8 (SSS-8) is a brief self-report questionnaire used to assess somatic symptom burden. It measures the perceived burden of common somatic symptoms. These symptoms were originally chosen to reflect common symptoms in primary care but they are relevant for a large number of diseases and mental disorders. The SSS-8 is a brief version of the popular Patient Health Questionnaire - 15 (PHQ-15).

Claudi Bockting is a Dutch clinical psychologist and Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Amsterdams Faculty of Medicine, Amsterdam University Medical Centers. Her research program focuses on identifying etiological factors of common mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse, and developing evidence-based psychotherapeutic interventions.

References

  1. 1 2 "HowNutsAreTheDutch". HoeGekIsNL. 13 December 2013. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  2. ↑ Pol, Margot (May 2014). "Allemaal gaga". Margot C Pol. De Volkskrant (a Dutch newspaper). Retrieved 21 December 2014.
  3. 1 2 Pepping, Anita (15 November 2014). "Iedereen is een beetje gek". Dagblad van het Noorden. Retrieved 21 December 2014.
  4. ↑ "The Interdisciplinary Center Psychopathology and Emotion regulation (ICPE)". August 2013. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  5. ↑ Gemma Blok (2004). Baas in eigen brein, Antipsychiatrie in Nederland, 1965-1985. Nieuwezijds. ISBN   978-90-5712-173-9.
  6. 1 2 Sarampalis, Tassos (June 2016). "HoeGekIs.NL – How Nuts Are The Dutch?". Mindwise. University of Groningen. Retrieved 4 October 2016.
  7. ↑ Csikszentmihalyi, M. (July 2014). Validity and Reliability of the Experience-Sampling Method. New York: Springer. p. 322. ISBN   978-94-017-9087-1.
  8. 1 2 van der Krieke, L; Blaauw, FJ; Emerencia, AC; Schenk, HM; Slaets, JP; Bos, EH; de Jonge, P; Jeronimus, BF (2016). "Temporal Dynamics of Health and Well-Being: A Crowdsourcing Approach to Momentary Assessments and Automated Generation of Personalized Feedback (2016)". Psychosomatic Medicine. 79 (2): 213–223. doi:10.1097/PSY.0000000000000378. PMID   27551988. S2CID   10955232.
  9. ↑ Emerencia, Ando Celino; Van Der Krieke, Lian; Bos, Elisabeth H.; De Jonge, Peter; Petkov, Nicolai; Aiello, Marco (2016). "Automating Vector Autoregression on Electronic Patient Diary Data (2016)" (PDF). IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics. 20 (2): 631–643. doi:10.1109/JBHI.2015.2402280. PMID   25680221. S2CID   14502723.
  10. ↑ van der Neut, Dagmar (1 June 2014). "Meten is Weten". Psychologie Magazine. Retrieved 28 November 2014.
  11. ↑ Blaauw, FJ; Schenk, HM; Jeronimus, BF; van der Krieke, L; de Jonge, P; Aiello, M; Emerencia, AC (2016). "Let's get Physiqual - an intuitive and generic method to combine sensor technology with ecological momentary assessments". Journal of Biomedical Informatics. 63: 141–149. doi: 10.1016/j.jbi.2016.08.001 . PMID   27498066.
  12. ↑ Baer, Drake (Jan 2017). "Neurotics Get an Extra Benefit From Being Extra Nice". Science of Us. New York Magazine. Retrieved 28 January 2017.
  13. ↑ Schenk, H.M.; et al. (2017). "Differential association between affect and somatic symptoms at the between- and within-individual level" (PDF). British Journal of Health Psychology. 22 (2): 270–280. doi:10.1111/bjhp.12229. PMID   28083924. S2CID   3358815.
  14. ↑ Wichers; et al. (2016). "Critical Slowing Down as a Personalized Early Warning Signal for Depression". Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 85 (2): 114–116. doi: 10.1159/000441458 . PMID   26821231.
  15. ↑ Jolanda J Kossakowski; Marijke CM Gordijn; Riese, Harriette; Lourens J Waldorp (2016). "Mean Field Dynamics of Graphs II: Assessing the Risk for the Development of Phase Transitions in Empirical Data". arXiv: 1610.05046 [stat.AP].

Further reading

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