Student Spotlight Award Recipient - Marianna Zacharia

Congratulations to Marianna Zacharia on being selected as the Student Spotlight Award winner for March 2024!

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, and conversations around highlighted areas.

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Learn more about Marianna Zacharia

Background of CBS Research/Clinical/Volunteering efforts/achievements:

I am a member of the ACThealthy: Clinical Psychology and Behavioral Medicine laboratory, supervised by Dr Maria Karekla since 2016. Thanks to my supervisor, I have been involved with various projects at ACThealthy laboratory, particularly in the ALGEA project for chronic pain and a smoking cessation project. I also provided individual interventions for a project on internal cues and drug dependency based on ACT. I have participated in the ACBS conferences since 2018 by presenting posters, panels, and symposia and several of these papers have been published. Thanks to the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science, I have been awarded the 2020 - 2021 ACBS Research Development Grant, which enabled me to conduct my PhD research project, an Intervention for female breast CANcer: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (I-CAN-ACT) for depression and physical pain. I am currently in the process of data analysis and write-up of my thesis.

Through my clinical placements, I have been trained in the use of ACT and other behavioral therapies (DBT) and use the CBS principles when providing psychological support to people with cancer and their families as well as individuals with disabilities, which are the populations I mostly work with.

Regarding volunteering, I was selected as the Student Representative of the ABCS Board in 2021-2022. Also, I served as the student representative of the Greece and Cyprus chapter and now as a member of the chapter. Additionally, I was a member of the organizing committee for the ACBS conference in July 2023 in Nicosia.

Autobiography:

I am a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Cyprus and a Registered Clinical Psychologist working in palliative care at the Cyprus Association of Cancer Patients and Friends providing psychological support to people with cancer and their families. I obtained a First-Class Honours BSc Degree in Psychology from the University of Southampton in 2012. Subsequently, I completed a three-year MSc degree in Clinical Psychology at the University of Nicosia in Cyprus, with a GPA of 4/4. My MSc thesis was on risk and resilience factors for post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in Cypriot police officers. I worked as a trainee clinical psychologist at the Centre for Therapy, Training and Research of the University of Nicosia (K.E.S.Y), at PASYKAF, the Hostel and Day Center “St. Catherine”, at Somateio Skapaneas (for people with disabilities), at the Adult Day Care Centre for Disabled from Communities District Morphou (for people with disabilities) and at the Psychiatric Hospital of Athalassa in Cyprus. I also provided individual psychotherapy to adults and parental counseling at the Counselling Center of the Municipality of Aglantzia, the Breast Center of Cyprus, as well as psychometric assessments to students at the Mental Health Center of the University of Cyprus.

As a researcher, I am particularly interested in the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions in women with breast cancer. Thus, my thesis focused on the development of a brief Acceptance and Commitment Therapy-based intervention for improving the quality of life of women with breast cancer who experience depressive symptoms or sadness and physical pain.

Future goals:

I hope that my thesis, the I-CAN-ACT project, will improve the psychological treatment currently offered for women with breast cancer by targeting the processes that are more related with improved treatment effects and that it will help in developing prevention programs to facilitate better physical pain management and diminish the likelihood of developing psychopathology in this cancer population. My goal is to contribute at least to some extent in alleviating people’s suffering and aiding them in achieving a valued-driven meaningful life.

Publications:

▪ Zacharia, M., & Karekla, M. (2022). The Role of Psychologists and Psychological Approaches in Cancer Care. In A. Kassianos (Ed.), Handbook of Quality of Life in Cancer (pp. 311-337). Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Cham.
▪ Zacharia, M., & Karekla, M. (2021). The Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Perspective: Case Conceptualization and Treatment of Depression in Cancer. In C. Charis & G. Panayiotou (Eds.), Depression conceptualization and treatment (pp. 123-147). Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68932-2_9
▪ Zacharia, M., Ioannou, M., Theofanous, A., Vasiliou, V. S., & Karekla, M. (2021). Does Cognitive Fusion show up similarly across two behavioral health samples? Psychometric properties and invariance of the Greek–Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire (G-CFQ). Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 21, 212-221.
▪ Gloster, A. T., Zacharia, M., & Karekla, M. (2020). Psychological aid for frontline healthcare workers. Clinical Neuropsychiatry, 17(4), 253-254.
▪ Theofanous, A., Ioannou, M., Zacharia, M., Georgiou, S. N., & Karekla, M. (2020). Gender, Age, and Time Invariance of the Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure (CAMM) and Psychometric Properties in Three Greek-Speaking Youth Samples. Mindfulness, 1- 10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01350-5
▪ Karekla, M., Zacharia, M., & Koushiou, M. (2018). Accept Pain for a Vital Life: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for the Treatment of Chronic Pain. In C. Charis & G. Panayiotou (Eds.), Somatoform and Other Psychosomatic Disorders (pp. 163-191). Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature Switzerland AG.