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Collaboration: Monash University, Australia

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A week-long visit last week kicked off the beginning of a collaboration between Penn State and Monash University in Australia.  The RTS lab is working with collaborators to examine social identity in recovery.  As a part of this project, we’ll be developing a computerized tool for understanding participants’ subjective views of their social identity–that is, how they relate to the groups around them–and examining how those social identities emerge from the momentary interactions that they engage in.  We’ll be asking them about their face-to-face, phone, text, and social media conversations with members of the groups they consider themselves to be a part of, and mapping out the way that those interactions lead to an identity as part of the group.  The longer-term goal is to be able to provide moment-to-moment advice on how to shape their relationships in order to promote the ones that lead to a sustained, healthy recovery that can help them to thrive.

New Article: Prospective associations between depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction in Black couples.

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Another new article is out as of last month from the Journal of Family Psychology.  This one is another application of Structural Equation Modeling to longitudinal data about dyads.  Here, we’re focused on the influence of discrimination and depression on marital satisfaction in heterosexual Black couples.  The article presents some intricate but important findings about discrimination, depression, the centrality of Black identity, and relationships.  Interestingly, there are also differences between husbands and wives, especially in terms of their influences on each other.

This article covers a lot of models, many of them fairly complex and somewhat exploratory.  But above all other things, it really draws attention to the need for increased study about minority populations in general and especially the intersection of discrimination and gender dynamics.  There’s huge complexity in this domain, and a great deal more research (and funding) is needed.  Especially if we want to start understanding how these things emerge from day-to-day interactions, we need a real call for new data sets that can help us to understand it.

The paper is Jenkins, A. I. C., Fredman, S. J., Le, Y., Sun, X., Brick, T. R., Skinner, O. D., & McHale, S. M. (2020). Prospective associations between depressive symptoms and marital satisfaction in Black couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 34(1), 12–23. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000573

Belgium!

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Dr. Brick took a trip to Belgium to speak at KU Leuven‘s Research Group of Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences. Two big events for Dr. Brick.  First was the dissertation defense of Merijn Mestdagh, whose dissertation looked at precomputation approaches and model similarity metrics to speed up processing, and at an interesting problem with standard deviations in cases where the means are bounded.

The second was a workshop about data mining approaches to ambulatory assessment data, looking at the timing of questionnaires and their responses.