Sarah Maes

Profile

Sarah Maes graduated as MSc in Clinical Psychology at Ghent University in 2009, obtained a degree in Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Cognitive Therapy in the same year and a degree in Clinical Neuropsychology in 2013. In the first ten years of her career, she worked as a clinical psychologist in a hospital as well as in a primary care practice, this in combination with giving mindfulness group training. In 2019 she started working as an assistant in the Ghent Health Psychology Lab, where she combines teaching, doctoral research and clinical work. She shares a mutual interest with her supervisor Stefaan Van Damme and co-supervisor Dimitri Van Ryckeghem in the underlying mechanisms of fatigue since it proved a difficult problem to treat in the patients she encountered.

Specifically, we have two objectives in this doctoral project. First, we aim to investigate if, regardless of the medical condition in which fatigue emerges, similar motivational underlying processes are at play. Also, the impact of executive control potentially moderating the association between motivation and fatigue will be investigated, and we will control for the effects of illness characteristics. Second, we aim to examine the content of self-report instruments typically used to assess fatigue in chronic medical conditions.

Interests

• Medical psychology and motivational processes in fatigue
• Neuropsychology
• Clinical psychology
• ACT and mindfulness