Recovery Science Research Collaborative

tbrick on

The Recovery Science Research Collaborative had its annual meeting at Penn State this week.  Great scientific discussion around the way to understand recovery.  The group combines qualitative researchers, clinicians, recovery specialists, and a few quantitative folks.  Lots of great discussion around frameworks and metatheories of recovery, the emergence of recovery science as an interdisciplinary junction of biology, psychology, sociology and medicine–combining the health, behavioral, and social sciences all at once.  Dr. Brick spoke about Wear-IT and EMA+Wearables approaches to modeling and intervening in the process of recovery to improve well being.

Emotion Over Time

tbrick on

Core affect is a way of thinking about emotional mood state in terms of two measures: valence (from positive to negative) and arousal (from highly active to placid). So if you’re super ticked off about something, that’s negative valence and high arousal, where if you’re just blissfully chill, you’re low arousal and positive valence.   But people aren’t just in one state forever–much more interesting is the way that they change.

Zita Oravecz and I look at the dynamics of core affect change within an individual in a recent paper: Associations Between Slow- and Fast-Timescale Indicators of Emotional Functioning in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.  There, we characterize the changes in core affect within a person in terms of a person’s home base in each dimension, the state they drop back to when there’s no real input, how much they fluctuate around that home base, how strongly their system regulates itself back to base, and the correlations between the ways those characteristics show up in valence and arousal.  Importantly, these characteristics turn out to be predictive of other “trait-level” characteristics, like the strategies you use when you have to deal with negative emotion.

Advanced Methods at Purdue

tbrick on

Dr. Brick took a trip this week to Purdue to speak at a symposium put together by the Advanced Methods at Purdue (AMAP) in the Behavioral, Health, and Social Sciences group.  They’re working hard to build up a strong multifaceted methods program out there, and seem to be doing pretty well.  Dr. Brick gave a talk entitled “Data Mining and Precision in Theory (Or: Rethinking Confirmatory Analysis)” about the increasingly blurry distinction between exploratory and confirmatory analysis as data mining approaches become more mainstream in the modern behavioral and health sciences.  State your hypotheses boldly, and be prepared to be wrong.

Belgium!

tbrick on

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.