Abstract

The goal of this project was to develop and promote Bayesian hypothesis tests for social scientists. By and large, social scientists have ignored the Bayesian revolution in statistics, and, consequently, most social scientists still assess the veracity of experimental effects using the same methodology that was used by their advisors and the advisors before them. This state of affairs is undesirable: social scientists conduct groundbreaking, innovative research only to analyse their results using methods that are old-fashioned or even inappropriate.

Recent years have seen increasing attention on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) research.

While research has largely focused on the dichotomy between patients diagnosed with mental disorders and healthy controls — in other words, investigations at the level of diagnoses — recent work has focused on psychopathology symptoms.

Symptomics research in the area of PTSD has been scarce so far, although several studies have focused on investigating the network structures of PTSD symptoms.

Part of the symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are alterations in arousal and reactivity which could be related to a maladaptive increase in the automated sensory change detection system of the brain. In the current EEG study we investigated whether the brain’s response to a simple auditory sensory change was altered in patients with PTSD relative to trauma-exposed matched controls who did not develop the disorder.

Background:

Psychological health is vital for effective employees, especially in stressful occupations like military and public safety sectors. Yet, until recently little empirical work has made the link  between requisite psychological resources and important mental health outcomes across time in those sectors. In this study we explore the association between 14 baseline psychological health attributes (such as adaptability, coping ability, optimism) and mental health outcomes following exposure to combat deployment.

Methods: