Marten de Vries

A note on this page. Independent biographical detail for Marten de Vries — birth date, early training, career chronology — is scarce in standard reference sources. Rather than supply particulars that cannot be checked, this page states only what is documented and is deliberately brief.

Introduction

Marten W. de Vries is a Dutch psychiatrist whose main contribution to psychology is methodological: he carried the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) — a technique for collecting people's thoughts, moods and behaviour in the moment, in ordinary daily settings — into psychiatry, where it became a working tool for studying mental disorders as they unfold in daily life rather than as they are recalled in the clinic.

He is a professor of psychiatry at Maastricht University, and his work has had a strong cross-cultural and global-health dimension alongside its methodological core.

The Experience Sampling Method in Psychiatry

ESM was developed in the 1970s by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Reed Larson and colleagues as a way of studying the flow of everyday experience: participants carry a booklet or device and record what they are doing, thinking and feeling when prompted at random moments across the day. De Vries's contribution was to test the method's reliability and validity for clinical populations and to argue that psychiatric phenomena — hallucinations, delusions, mood fluctuation, the texture of daily impairment — could be studied in the settings where patients actually live.

The programme's clearest statement is the volume he edited, The Experience of Psychopathology: Investigating Mental Disorders in their Natural Settings (Cambridge University Press, 1992), which gathered the method's founding validation studies — including contributions from Csikszentmihalyi and Larson — together with its applications to psychiatric conditions. Under the related name ecological momentary assessment (EMA), the approach de Vries championed is now standard in psychiatric research, and the Maastricht group he built helped institutionalise it.

Impact and Legacy

De Vries's methodological legacy outgrew his own publication record. Momentary-assessment designs are now used across clinical psychology and psychiatry to study symptom dynamics, predictors of relapse, and the validity of retrospective recall — much of that work descends directly from the ESM-in-psychiatry programme he edited and directed at Maastricht. Because the approach depends on patients' own momentary reports, its known limits also travel with it: compliance burdens, reactivity to self-monitoring, and the gap between what can be sampled and what a clinical interview can assess.

Learn More

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — co-developer of the Experience Sampling Method.
• All Psychologists — browse the full biographical collection.