Congratulations to Inês A. Trindade on being selected as the Student Spotlight Award winner for March 2018!
The purpose of this award is to highlight students who are doing important work in the CBS community whether for research, clinical, and/or volunteer-humanitarian efforts.
This is a way to highlight their achievements, let the ACBS community know important work students are doing, and possibly provide a platform for mentoring/collaboration/professional development/conversations around highlighted areas.
Learn more about Inês:
Background of CBS Research/Clinical/Volunteering efforts/achievements:
I started researching in CBS during my Master’s Thesis in Clinical and Health Psychology at University of Coimbra. My thesis aimed to develop a body image-related cognitive fusion questionnaire and analyse the impact of this construct on eating psychopathology. During this time I was a clinical psychology intern at the Psychiatric Unit of the Coimbra University Hospital, where I was trained in CBS clinical practise. After my MSc I did a professional voluntary internship where I applied ACT in women with eating difficulties. At this time, I became a collaborator at CINEICC (University of Coimbra), a research centre with a strong focus on CBS, and later a PhD student at the same centre. My PhD studies have two main focuses. The first is the analysis of the impact of processes such as experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and shame on psychological and physical outcomes in chronic illness, which has provided interesting findings on the importance of these processes in several chronic health conditions. The most relevant published paper from my PhD studies to date has longitudinally demonstrated that cognitive fusion predicts the evolution of psychological as well as physical health among inflammatory bowel disease patients. The second focus of my PhD was to integrate acceptance, mindfulness and compassion-based psychotherapies in one intervention adapted to cancer patients, the MIND (as in “mentality” and “care”) programme. I applied this intervention to groups of breast cancer patients as principal therapist. The feasibility and preliminary efficacy of the intervention have been demonstrated (paper under review).
Autobiography:
I was born and raised in Coimbra, a city in the centre of Portugal. I’m a 4th year PhD student in Clinical Psychology at CINEICC, University of Coimbra, Portugal, working with Dr. José Pinto-Gouveia and Dr. Cláudia Ferreira. I discovered mindfulness meditation in my adolescence and have stuck with it almost ever since. In my master’s I started professional training in contemplative practices and CBS. Choosing to study CBS in chronic illness came from a personal motivation. Having been diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease at 15, my late adolescence was marked by the adaptation to the illness, which now, after 12 years, I can say will probably never be over. This is my motivation to study chronic illness (and in particular inflammatory bowel disease) in my PhD studies, and I hope I am able to continue to do so. In my spare time I love to read and travel to places I’ve never been to. I’m also passionate about vegan cooking, interior design, and photography.
Future goals:
After my PhD, I have two main goals. The first is to adapt the MIND programme to inflammatory bowel disease and to test its efficacy on psychosocial outcomes on this population; the second (and more far away) goal is to test the effects of mindfulness and related processes on inflammation and other disease markers in inflammatory bowel disease patients.
Relevant publications:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjhp.12280/abstract
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00384-017-2774-z
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1359105315587142
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpp.2035/abstract
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1359105317718925
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10620-015-3786-6
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10862-015-9509-7
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/cpp.2125/abstract
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11136-016-1378-3
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03630242.2016.1267688
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/papt.12047/full
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019566631400227X
http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1359105315573438