From fellow to Young Talent: Ghislaine Schyns

Ghislaine Schyns defended her PhD thesis, “Conquer Your Cravings: Investigating the Effects and Working Mechanisms of Food Cue Exposure in Overweight and Obese Individuals,” in 2018 at the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University. Since then, she has been working as an Assistant Professor at the same faculty. She is a behavioral scientist with a strong clinical focus.

Her research primarily investigates cognitive-behavioural treatments for eating disorders and obesity in both children and adults, with a particular emphasis on exposure therapy. She examines the effectiveness of exposure-based interventions, individual factors associated with treatment success, and the psychological processes underlying treatment-related change. Her current projects focus on studying the effects and mechanisms of exposure therapy within ongoing lifestyle interventions for adults and for children with obesity. She is particularly interested in understanding whether and how exposure effects generalize across stimuli and contexts, both within and across symptom domains. Within NSMD, she contributes to projects investigating the effects and generalization of exposure therapy using network approaches. By studying comorbid samples, her work compares network-informed exposure with diagnosis-centered exposure approaches, with the aim of advancing the mechanistic understanding of exposure therapy and translating these insights into improved clinical practice.