The best of both worlds? General principles of psychopathology in personalized assessment.

A complex systems approach to psychopathology proposes that general principles lie in the dynamic patterns of psychopathology, which are not restricted to specific psychological processes like symptoms or affect. Hence, it must be possible to find general change profiles in time series data of fully personalized questionnaires. In the current study, we examined general change profiles in personalized self-ratings and related these to four measures of treatment outcome (International Symptom Rating, 21-item Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale, daily symptom severity, and self-reflective capacity).

Anticipating the direction of symptom progression using critical slowing down: a proof-of-concept study.

Background: As complex dynamic systems approach a transition, their dynamics change. This process, called critical slowing down (CSD), may precede transitions in psychopathology as well. This study investigated whether CSD may also indicate the direction of future symptom transitions, i.

The rise and fall of rationality in language.

The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning. To explore if this is indeed the case, we analyze language in millions of books covering the period from 1850 to 2019 represented in Google nGram data. We show that the use of words associated with rationality, such as "determine" and "conclusion," rose systematically after 1850, while words related to human experience such as "feel" and "believe" declined.

Evaluating the performance of multivariate indicators of resilience loss.

Various complex systems, such as the climate, ecosystems, and physical and mental health can show large shifts in response to small changes in their environment. These 'tipping points' are notoriously hard to predict based on trends. However, in the past 20 years several indicators pointing to a loss of resilience have been developed.

Foreseeing the future of mutualistic communities beyond collapse.

Changing conditions may lead to sudden shifts in the state of ecosystems when critical thresholds are passed. Some well-studied drivers of such transitions lead to predictable outcomes such as a turbid lake or a degraded landscape. Many ecosystems are, however, complex systems of many interacting species.

Finding the direction of lowest resilience in multivariate complex systems.

The dynamics of complex systems, such as ecosystems, financial markets and the human brain, emerge from the interactions of numerous components. We often lack the knowledge to build reliable models for the behaviour of such network systems. This makes it difficult to predict potential instabilities.