APS 2018: Collection of all network presentations

APS 2018 — the conference of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco, May 2018 — featured many talks on the topics complex systems, time-series models, network models, and modeling intensive longitudinal data assessed via experience sampling. I promised to collect all slides I could hunt down, and want to thank everybody who was willing to contribute slides. If you know about other talks I missed, please let me know and I’m happy to add them here anytime.

APS 2018: a mini network conference

Large conferences like APS can sometimes be too generalist, too broad, and can lack more detailed information, a focus on more specialist questions. This was not the case at APS regarding network modeling. I counted 5 symposia on network-related topics, and several more in which network talks were featured. It felt like a small mini-conference on networks, with a ton of familiar faces in the symposia, and also a ton of new faces. There were many insightful talks, but also very in-depth discussions with many very well informed audience members. Not only were there numerous in-depth talks; together, the presentations also covered a very wide range of topics, ranging from the equivalence between factor and network models, nomothetic analyses in cross-sectional and longitudinal data, idiographic analyses in time-series data, and clinical trials with interventions based on network models, all the way to numerous statistical extensions such as novel centrality indices, or entirely new network models.

I was most excited to see severals talks about the integration of 1) new data assessment strategies (e.g. via smartwatches); 2) new methodological tools to analyze such data; and 3) empirical studies in everyday clinical practice. When we submitted our own symposium on the topic to APS, we ended the symposium title with a question mark: “From description to intervention: Can network models based on ambulatory assessments provide novel treatment targets?” At APS, I realized how many groups in the world are working on this intersection of methodology and clinical psychology. This is crucial and will allow us to actually test and try to falsify network theory, and will show us how useful the framework really is. But talks were not limited to clinical psychology and methodology – personality is also becoming a hot topic that networks models are applied to more often.

Network presentations

Here is a brief summary of all talks & presenters; the order is simply the order by which I obtained the presentations. You can find all slides on the Open Science Framework¹.

• Richard McNally | Bayesian Network Analyses of Symptoms in Patients with Bipolar Disorder
• Riet van Bork | Simplicity of networks and factor models
• Adela Isvoranu | Big5 In Schizophrenia: Personality through Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling and Network Analysis
• Alexandre Heeren | Mapping Network Connectivity among Symptoms of Social Anxiety and Comorbid Depression in People with Social Anxiety Disorder
• Sacha Epskamp | Intra-individual Networks and Latent Variable Models
• Sacha Epskamp | Personalized Networks in Clinical Practices: Recent developments, Challenges and Future Directions.
• Emorie Beck | Idiographic Personality: A Methodological Perspective on Measuring and Modeling Individuals
• Adriene Beltz | Behavioral Networks in Oral Contraceptive Users: Exploring Ovarian Hormone Links to Gendered Cognition and Personality Qualities
• Casper Albers | Changing Individuals Modelling smooth and sudden changes in temporal dynamics
• Aaron Fisher | Data-DrivenCase Conceptualization: Applying Research to Routine Care
• Payton Jones | Bridge centrality: identifying bridge symptoms in psychopathology networks
• Charlotte Vrijen | Personalized interventions based on experience sampling can effectively improve pleasure
• Tim Kaiser | Intersession Processes in Psychotherapy
• Oisín Ryan | Centrality and Interventions in Continuous-Time Dynamical Networks
• Siwei Liu | Can We Use the Random Effects Estimates in Multilevel Models to Characterize Individuals?
• Benjamin Bellet | Bereavement Outcomes as Causal Systems
• Angelique Cramer | The baby and the bathwater: The promise of both nomothetic and idiographic (network) modeling
• Aidan Wright | Toward an Individualized Psychology: Promises and Challenges in Modeling the Individual
• Katherine Jonas | A Comparison of Network Models and Latent Variable Models for Longitudinal Data
• Date van der Veen | Prel@pse– Preventing Relapse in OCD, a proof of principle study
• Julia Möller | Mixed emotions about school: A co-endorsement network analysis of positive and negative emotions

APS: other topics

In case you are interested, I wrote two other posts about APS 2018 on my personal blog: The first covers issues with transparency, inclusion, and open science at APS; the second summarizes our APS symposium entitled “Measurement Schmeasurement”, featuring talks by Jessica Flake, Mijke Rhemtulla, Andre Wang, Scott Lilienfeld, and yours truly.

Call for guest blogs

I also want to highlight briefly that psych-networks.com is transitioning more into a community platform, featuring many guest bloggers. I want this site to become a hub of communication among network researchers in psychology, where they can post new papers, new ideas, discuss hot topics, and so forth. So if you want to write something, please contact me, and I’d be very happy to see if we can make it work! This opportunity is meant for everybody, from very early career researchers all the way to professors. Since last year, most guest bloggers were male, I would like to feature more female guest bloggers … help me make it happen!

1. Disclaimer: Obviously, the content of the talks does not necessarily reflect my own opinion