Research Seminar
Regime-switching in psychological processesEllen HamakerUniversiteit Utrecht | |
| Abstract: | Many psychological processes are characterized by shifts between distinct psychological states. For instance, addiction can be characterized by recovery versus relapse; posttraumatic stress syndrome can be characterized by times of intrusion and times of denial; bipolar disorder is characterized by episodes of mania and depression; and in reaction time tasks people may switch between different strategies, such as being fast at the cost of making more mistakes versus being more accurate at the cost of being slower. Such shifts between distinct psychological states are referred to as regime-switches, and there are a number if techniques that can be used to model this kind of behavior. In this presentation I discuss three different regime-switching models that were developed in econometrics, and I apply these models to psychological data. In the first example a change-point model is used to determine whether biofeedback therapy has an effect on individual problems of children (e.g., ADHD-related symptomatology). In the second example a threshold autoregressive model is used to determine whether people switch between different strategies when performing a cognitive task, and whether this switching is triggered by a feedback loop in the process. In the third example a Markov-switching autoregressive model is used to determine whether daily mood fluctuations in patients with bipolar disorder can be understood as switches between distinct states that can be referred to as manic and depressed. I highlight the important differences between these models and discuss their potential for the study of psychological processes. PLEASE NOTE THE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME OF THE SEMINAR! |
| Date: | Thu Mar 26, 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm |
| Place: | room 02.51 (Department of Psychology, Tiensestraat 102, 3000 Leuven) |