Congratulations to Sérgio Andrade Carvalho on being selected as the Student Spotlight Award winner for April 2019!
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 Sérgio:
Background of CBS Research/Clinical/Volunteering efforts/achievements:
I have started studying CBS in 2010, as a Masters student at University of Coimbra, Portugal. My master thesis was supervised by José Pinto-Gouveia, and we explored the relationship between socialization of emotions, emotional schemas, cognitive fusion and psychopathological symptoms in the general population. After completing my Masters and with a newly discovered interest in ACT, I went to Edinburgh for 5-month and learnt with David Gillanders more about CBS research and ACT with chronic pain patients. I have been conducting research on the efficacy of CBS-based interventions in different health conditions (psychosis, binge eating in obesity, chronic pain), and on the relationship between psychological processes and health outcomes. I am a research member of projects that are testing ICT-delivered contextual-behavioral interventions (for binge eating and chronic pain), including an Horizon2020 European consortium (NoHoW) that is developing and testing the efficacy of an ICT-delivered multi-center intervention for weight-loss maintenance. I have been particularly interested in self-compassion, and I am a member of an international project that explores cross-cultural differences in the meaning and experience of compassion. I am currently on the 3rd year of my PhD, which has two main goals: 1) to test the adding value of two self-compassion sessions in a 6-session ACT group intervention for women with chronic pain (COMP.ACT), and 2) to better understand the relationship between self-compassion and ACT core processes, through both cross-sectional and three-wave 1-year longitudinal designs. Several papers on this have been published or are currently under review.
Autobiography:
I was born on an island (São Miguel) of a beautiful Portuguese archipelago (Azores). In 2006, I went to Coimbra, a city at the heart of Portugal mainland, to study Psychology, which was a transformative experience, both at an academic and personal level. I´m a 3rd year PhD student in Clinical Psychology, and I am currently developing my research on self-compassion and ACT in chronic pain. I have found CBS to be a useful tool that has enriched my interpersonal relationships, and shifted my understanding of what being human is all about. Since my graduation in 2011, I have been conducting research on CBS, and have recently embraced the challenge of being a partner of a private practice organization (https://gabinetepsicologiacoimbra.com) that provides different educational and clinical services, including transfer knowledge on mental health literacy to the general population. In addition to my PhD studies, I am also part of several projects, including on CBS and Gender and Sexual Minorities, which interests me both as a researcher and as an activist. In addition to studying clinical psychology, the recent global political events have made me very interested in the interface between CBS and politics, particularly on the evolutionary basis for group-thinking, and both the potential and limitations of interpersonal-level social change. I am an avid consumer of music (from Progressive Metal to Soul and Spirituals), a lover of books (from poetry to science communication), and a proud uncle of two smart, beautiful and overly-active 6-year old kids.
Future goals:
In addition to continuing doing research on clinical psychology, after completing my PhD, I am very much interested in exploring CBS as a science-based route for social change, especially the use of evidence-based knowledge as tools for social justice, and more specifically to develop research that integrates social psychology topics (e.g. social representation) and CBS as useful lenses to understand the role of identity and discrimination, and promoting social acceptance of diversity.
Relevant publications:
- https://estudogeral.sib.uc.pt/handle/10316/47269 [Petrocchi, N., Matos, M., Carvalho, S. & Baiocco, R. (2016). Compassion-Focused Therapy in the Treatment of Shame-Based Difficulties in Gender and Sexual Minorities. In Skinta, M.D. & Curtin, A. (2016), Mindfulness and Acceptance for Gender and Sexual Minorities. Oakland, CA: Context Press. 1st Edition, pp. 69-86.]
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212144718301509 [Carvalho, S.A., Palmeira, L., Gillanders, D., Pinto-Gouveia, J., & Castilho, P. (2018). The utility of the valuing questionnaire in chronic pain. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 9, 21-29. doi: 10.1016/j.jcbs.2018.06.002]
- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223980.2018.1507990 [Carvalho, S.A., Pinto-Gouveia, J., Gillanders, D., & Castilho, P. (2018). Pain and depressive symptoms: exploring cognitive fusion and self-compassion in a moderated mediation model. The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied. doi: 10.1080/00223980.2018.1507990]
- https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/an-implementation-trial-of-actbased-bibliotherapy-for-irritable-bowel-syndrome(ae011e00-1616-454e-afdb-87548294c3cd).html [Gillanders, D., Ferreira, N. B., Angioni, E., Carvalho, S. A., & Eugenicos, M. P. (2017). An Implementation Trial of ACT-Based Bibliotherapy for Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 6(2), 172-177. doi: 10.1016/j.jcbs.2017.04.006].
- http://self-compassion.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Pinto-Gouveia2016.pdf [Pinto-Gouveia, J., Carvalho, S., Palmeira, L., Castilho, P., Duarte, C., Ferreira, C., Duarte, J., Cunha, M., Matos, M. & Costa, J. (2016). Incorporating psychoeducation, mindfulness and self-compassion in a new program for binge eating (BEfree): exploring processes of change. Journal of Health Psychology. Epub ahead of print. doi: 10.1177/1359105316676628].
- https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/94982315.pdf [Lapa, T. A., Carvalho, S., Viana, J. S., Ferreira, P. L., & Pinto-Gouveia, J. (2016). Stressors in anaesthesiology: development and validation of a new questionnaire: A cross-sectional study of Portuguese anaesthesiologists. European Journal of Anaesthesiology (EJA), 33(11), 807-815. doi: 10.1097/EJA.0000000000000518].
- https://estudogeral.sib.uc.pt/handle/10316/47036?locale=pt_PT [Baião, R., Gilbert, P., McEwan, K., & Carvalho, S. (2015). Forms of self‐criticising/attacking & self‐reassuring scale: Psychometric properties and normative study. Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 88(4), 438-452. doi: 10.1111/papt.12049].