Category Archives: Structural equation models

No evidence for a psychological trait of impulsivity

This is a brief commentary by Orestis Zavlis (Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London, United King) and me on the recent PNAS paper entitled “Impulsivity is a stable, measurable, and predictive psychological trait”. The paper follows the typical structure of alphabet papers — papers that have established factors of C(ognitive dysfunctioning) or D(ark factor… Read more »

Common problems of factors models in psychopathology research

I recently stumbled across the paper “A metastructural model of mental disorders and pathological personality traits”, authored by Aidan Wright and Leonard Simms in 2015. I enjoyed reading it: it’s a strong methodological paper, using state-of-the-art exploratory structural equation models (ESEM). It would have been a pleasure for me to review this paper: a very… Read more »

Common depression scales are neither unidimensional nor measurement invariant

We published a new study in Psychological Assessment a few days ago, and I would like to take the time to explain what these results imply. You can find the full text here. Let me summarize the findings first. We examined 2 crucial psychometric assumptions that are part of nearly all contemporary depression research. We… Read more »

Bereavement paper published !

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Our new paper “From Loss to Loneliness: The Relationship Between Bereavement and Depressive Symptoms” was just published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology (PDF). In the paper we examined a prospective cohort of 515 individuals, half of which would experience spousal loss throughout the course of the study (the other half was queried as control… Read more »