Public time-series data of 40 outpatients (21 items, 130 measurements)

This guest post was written by Aaron Fisher (afisher@berkeley.edu) who is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Idiographic Dynamics Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Aaron argues for a shift from nomothetic to idiographic research, and describes a new dataset he made publicly available for …

Six new network papers, including a review of the empirical literature

The last weeks have been pretty busy with teaching, traveling, and writing that I didn’t find the time I wanted to for blogging. To catch up, this blog post will feature several new network papers (in alphabetical order by first author). It is becoming increasingly hard to keep up with …

New paper: differential variability of variables drives network structure

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In psychopathological networks, we often model ordinal items (problems or symptoms) that are not normally distributed, especially in general population samples. But if a variable shows a floor effect, meaning that the mean is close to 0, it often has a small variance, which in turn means that the variable …

R tutorial: power issues & robustness of network models

A new paper by Mohammad Afzali and colleagues was published a few days ago in the Journal of Affective Disorders, entitled “A Network Approach to the Comorbidity between Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder: the Role of Overlapping Symptoms”. The authors estimate the network structure of 36 symptoms in …

Dynamical systems study follows 1 psychotic patient for 1 full year

When we recently submitted a review paper on empirical network studies in psychopathology, we realized that the majority of prior papers had focused on the analyses of groups, e.g. depressed patients, psychotic patients, or people with autism. Fewer studies had looked into the question of the dynamic character of symptoms …

Expected influence: a new centrality metric by Robinaugh et al. 2016

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When we estimate the centrality of nodes in networks, one metric that is commonly used is node strength centrality or degree centrality. In unweighted networks were edges are either 0 or 1, this is simply the sum of edges. Let’s create a brief example in R: we create an adjacency …

2 new conceptual network papers from a clinical perspective

Two new conceptual papers were published recently that tackle the question what network theory and network models can contribute to clinical science. Together, they provide a great introductory read and cover a large number of clinically relevant topics. While many technical papers are available by now, it is good to …

Network of conscientiousness facets: Costantini & Perugini 2016 J Res Pers

Giulio Costantini is back! After his dissertation “Network Analysis: A New Perspective on Personality Psychology”, and his two insightful 2015 papers “State of the aRt personality research: A tutorial on network analysis of personality data in R” and “Development of indirect measures of conscientiousness: Combining a facets approach and network …

Comorbidity network of depression & anxiety symptoms: Beard et al. 2016

A new network paper by Beard et al. entitled “Network Analysis of Depression and Anxiety Symptom Relations in a Psychiatric Sample” will appear soon in Psychological Medicine. I tend to think of the paper as a state-of-the-art replication of the great comorbidity paper by Cramer et al. 2010 who investigated …