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

Society for Ambulatory Assessment (SAA2019)

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Dr. Brick presented at the Society for Ambulatory Assessment’s 2019 meeting in Syracuse, New York.  The SAA is dedicated to examining the applications and uses of tools like Wear-IT to clinical and research settings.  As always, a phenomenal set of scientists were there.  Penn State’s College of Health and Human Development was there in force, with a number of great presentations.

Dr. Brick presented in-process work using new statistical and data mining methods focused on real-time feature selection.  The idea is that smartphone surveys are annoying, and the longer they are the more annoying they are.  Annoyance leads to people ignoring the surveys, which means less data and more participant costs (e.g. money, energy, burnout).  The goal of this new work is to make in-the-moment decisions about which questions to ask and how to ask them, in order to minimize the burden on the participants and maximize the amount of data gathered.

industryXchange 2019

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Dr. Brick, Ms. Dickens, and Mr. Mundie all attended Penn State’s industryXchange 2019 to talk about new developments from the lab. This year’s workshop focused on sensors and their applications, so we mostly showed off applications of wearable and passive measurement devices, and the ways that they could be applied to improve health and well-being, and assist with psychopathology.

Dr. Brick also presented some upcoming work with Dr. Jessica Menold using these same approaches to enhance workplace efficiency, reduce worker stress and burnout, and improve on-the-job learning.

CCSA Conference 2019

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Penn State’s Consortium to Combat Substance Abuse (CCSA) had its first annual conference today.  Members of the RTS lab presented a poster there focused on trying to define and understand the process of recovery at a basic level.

One primary focus of the poster was aimed at understanding something called recovery capital.  The idea is pretty straightforward: these are the characteristics of a person, their holdings, and their environment and community that provide support that improves recovery.  One form of recovery capital is traditional capital: if you’ve got the financial resources to be able to, for example, take 90 days off of work to go to a rehab facility, that is one characteristic that can help with your recovery.  But it goes a lot further than that.  Supportive relationships, community support, and a whole suite of other characteristics can contribute to recovery.

There are a wide array of paths to recovery.  One of them that takes advantage of some of these aspects of recovery capital uses recovery communities to provide a variety of these different levels of support, and one application of the Wear-IT project is looking at communities like these and trying to understand what characteristics of these communities make them most effective.

The CCSA conference has turned out to be an amazing event that’s building some great connections.  I’m very much looking forward to how this group advances.  The conference really showed that Penn State, with its ties to prevention, outreach, treatment, and legislature across Commonwealth, really has the potential to have a tremendous impact.

Quantitative Methods Series at USC

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Dr. Brick took a trip this week to the University of Southern California to visit Dr. Chris Beam in the Psychology department, and Dr. John Prindle in the School of social work.

He also gave a presentation to kick off USC’s Quantitative Methods Series, discussing new models of day-to-day affect and emotion, and their expected relationships to emotion regulation.  Lots of interesting discussion about exciting data sets and interesting new approaches to measurement!