Events and Resources
Convention Events
At each annual meeting, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) organizes seminars on advanced methodology and statistics (AMASS) relevant to research in psychological and behavioral sciences.
The Clinical Research Methods and Statistics Special Interest Group organizes symposia and panel submissions for each ABCT annual meeting. We also organize an annual poster session within the ABCT annual meeting's SIG exposition. We welcome submissions from diverse topics either in the development or application of novel research methodology or statistics.
See below for information about our SIG's events at the ABCT 2022 Convention in November. All ABCT attendees are welcome at these events. We look forward to seeing you in NYC!
Annual Meeting and Distinguished Speaker
Our annual SIG Meeting will take place Saturday, November 19, 2022 at 8:30-9:30am EDT in Gilbert (4th floor of the conference hotel). We will discuss SIG business and hear presentations from this year's distinguished speaker and poster award winner.
We are thrilled to announce our distinguished speaker this year is Katharina Schultebraucks, Ph.D. of Columbia University. Dr. Schultebraucks is an expert on machine learning in clinical science and she will present during the second half of our annual meeting (9-9:30am) on November 19.
Dr. Schultebraucks' talk is titled "Advances in Machine Learning for Predicting Stress and Resilience." The abstract for her presentation is below:
Digital technologies and advances in computational methods have become key drivers of innovation in many medical fields. For instance, in precision psychiatry, accurate and reliable measures of mental health are critical for informing patient care and clinical research. There has been growing concern over the limitations of traditional mental health assessments that are typically grounded in nosology defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health and are based on interviewer-led assessments or patient self-report questionnaires. Whereas such gold-standard clinical assessments can be cost-prohibitive in research, insensitive to change, and prone to subjective biases, the use of digital technologies provides opportunity to improve the practical feasibility as well as the inter-rater and test-retest reliability of repeated mental health assessments in clinical research. The key promise of this approach is to unlock the clinical potential of digital technologies in ways that foster research of high clinical relevance and impact on clinical care.
In this talk, I will highlight examples of digital approaches in psychiatry from my own multidisciplinary research that is focused on bringing together the expertise of clinical practitioners with recent advances in predictive modeling and digital phenotyping. The presented findings show that digital biomarkers extracted using digital phenotyping bear high potential for clinical application and may improve the scalability and sensitivity of clinical assessments using passive patient evaluations. In view of these recent advancements in prognosticating risk using computational methods, I will conclude by discussing the clinical implications for the future use of machine learning approaches for predicting and monitoring posttraumatic stress and resilience in clinical settings.
SIG Symposia and Poster Presentations
We have two SIG-sponsored symposia at this year's convention:
Symposium 68 - Expanding Your Analytic Toolkit: Applying Innovative Statistical Methods to Clinical Science
Saturday, November 19 10-11:30am EDT at Chelsea (7th floor)
Presenters: Kay Shin, Ph.D., Patrice Arkfeld, M.S., Alessandro De Nadai, Ph.D. and Steven Brunwasser, Ph.D.
Discussant: Craig Henderson, Ph.D.
Symposium 119 - Recent Developments in Assessment, Diagnosis, and Classification of OCD and Related Disorders
Sunday, November 20 10-11:30am EDT at Juilliard/Imperial (5th floor)
Presenters: Jonathan Abramowitz, Ph.D., Dean McKay, ABPP, Ph.D., Margaret Andover, Ph.D., and Joseph F. McGuire, Ph.D.
Discussant: David Tolin, Ph.D.
We have an excellent line-up of poster presentations for the Annual SIG Expo, 6:30-8:30pm on Friday, November 18 in the Broadway Ballroom (6th floor):
Recommendations for Improving Psychological Intervention Mediation Research: The Example of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Lauren B. Finkelstein, Joel N. Fishbein, Jason B. Luoma, Ph.D., & Joanna J. Arch, Ph.D.
Reasons for Psilocybin Use: An Application of Exploratory Graph Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling
Bethany A. Gray, Olivia L. Bolts, & Mark A. Prince, Ph.D.
A Bayesian Examination of the Effect of a Mental Health Psychosocial Education Vignette on Stigma Toward Persons with Schizophrenia and Depression
Lainie K. Krumenacker & D. Gage Jordan, Ph.D.
The Alabama Parenting Questionnaire Revised (APQ-R): Proposal and Psychometric Validation
Andrew Manocchio & Craig D. Marker, Ph.D.
A Factor Analytic Validation of the Screen for Adult Anxiety and Related Disorders
Lia E. Follet, Natalie R. Charamut, Colin Park, Hide Okuno, Caroline Vincent, & Eric A. Youngstrom
Resources
More information about the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) and the annual ABCT convention can be found at abct.org
For a comprehensive list of other specialized methodology and statistics training opportunities, please see Alan Reifman's excellent 2018 compendium
For online support, assistance with a wide array of analyses can be found at the IDRE at UCLA at http://www.ats.ucla.edu/stat/
For latent variable models, excellent input can be found at the Mplus forums at http://www.statmodel.com/discussion/messages/board-topics.html
Information and assistance in structural equation modeling within the freely available program R is available through OpenMx at http://openmx.psyc.virginia.edu
We send monthly resources about current methods topics to our SIG listserv, which you can join at https://sites.google.com/view/abctclinicalresearchmethods/join
