Abstract

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as child maltreatment and bullying, are well-established risk factors for biopsychosocial health across the lifespan. However, the pathways linking ACEs to various negative outcomes remain less clear. The FACE longitudinal epidemiological study aims to identify the mechanisms through which ACEs contribute to later psychosocial difficulties, with a particular focus on emotion regulation and social information processing/social skills. Additionally, the study examines service use and barriers to professional help-seeking among young people with and without ACEs. The sample consists of 2,500 Swiss emerging adults from a randomly selected population.

The second component of the project is the FACE intervention study, which focuses on developing and evaluating a guided self-help app for emerging adults with a history of ACEs. The intervention provides psychoeducational content on ACEs, their consequences, and related risk and resilience factors. It specifically targets emotion regulation and social biases/social skills as potential key mechanisms influencing psychosocial adaptation, using a crossover design. The app is designed to enhance resilience, well-being, self-efficacy for coping with emotions, and social problem-solving.

The talk will present preliminary findings from both the epidemiological and intervention studies and explore their clinical implications for the design of self-help apps.