- The study of psychological and developmental disorders ultimately comes down to two methodological questions: 1) Is how we measure symptoms of these disorders sufficient to reconstruct the underlying dysfunctional process? 2) Is our empirically informed understanding of the underlying dysfunctional process sufficient for us to design interventions? In this talk, I suggest that the first question has not yet been answered to satisfaction and that this is in part due to blind spots in how we, as a field, model data about psychological disorders. Next, I recast model specification as a question of observability and controllability. Doing so reveals how many of the assumptions that make modeling easier (e.g., stationarity, linearity, consistent timescales, lack of emergent behavior) hamstring our ability to understand the disorders and develop effective interventions. I argue that we should create a virtuous cycle of formal mathematical models that inform intervention development, which can in turn be used to validate and calibrate said formal models. To illustrate, I step through a recently developed formal model of panic disorder and discuss how to integrate it with future empirical intervention studies.
Time and Location:
12:30pm, Zoom
Date:
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Subtitle:
"Psychopathology in the Flatlands: A control theory perspective on studying psychopathological processes." (Zoom link -- https://virginia.zoom.us/j/8368706265#success, Meeting ID: 836 870 6265).