The prevalence and potential harmful effects of conspiracy theories have garnered increasing attention from psychologists. Understanding the psychological and social factors that contribute to...Show moreThe prevalence and potential harmful effects of conspiracy theories have garnered increasing attention from psychologists. Understanding the psychological and social factors that contribute to belief in conspiracy theories is crucial for managing the preventative measures and promoting evidence-based decision-making. However, the field of psychology has recently faced challenges regarding the replicability and robustness of research findings. This bachelor thesis aims to investigate the robustness and replicability of interaction effects in a study on beliefs in conspiracy theories and attitudes towards anti-coronavirus measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. The thesis extracts data from a study by Hudecek et al. (2022) on the psychological correlates of beliefs in conspiracy theories in Germany. Specifically, it examines the interaction effect between dark triad personality traits and social status in predicting belief in conspiracy theories. The thesis utilizes resampling to test the robustness of the interaction effects. The analysis includes three subsamples (random, central, extreme) with three dropout conditions (10%, 20%, 30%). F tests are conducted to assess the variance between two given methods. The results revealed that the distribution of the interaction coefficients remain fairly stable in the central resampling approach pointing to robustness, however, significant inconsistencies were observed in the random and extreme resampling approach. Future research calls for replicating the study in diverse populations, investigating additional predictors of belief in conspiracy theories and testing the robustness and replicability of previous findings to address the replication crisis in the social sciences.Show less
One of the many common consequences of experiencing trauma in childhood is a tendency to develop psychopathological symptoms in adolescence and early adulthood. A growing area of psychological...Show moreOne of the many common consequences of experiencing trauma in childhood is a tendency to develop psychopathological symptoms in adolescence and early adulthood. A growing area of psychological research is focusing on uncovering factors that make certain children resilient to the development of these symptoms. According to a study done by Kasparek et al. in 2020, behavioral sensitivity to reward is one such resiliency factor. They found that reward sensitivity moderates the relationship between childhood trauma and developing externalizing symptoms later in life. The present study assessed the robustness of Kasparek et al.’s results via regression analysis and F-tests for equality of variance. This was done using a modified bootstrapping method to remove increasing percentages of participants from random, central, and extreme values of the sample. Despite the significant changes in F-values between the subsamples, the interaction coefficient itself remained relatively stable in the central and extreme conditions, indicating a moderately high probability that the interaction effect does exist in the real world.Show less
Research master thesis | Psychology (research) (MSc)
open access
Evidence-based mental health programs have long conceptualized mental disorders as interactions between thoughts, feelings, behaviours and external factors. Idiographic network models are a...Show moreEvidence-based mental health programs have long conceptualized mental disorders as interactions between thoughts, feelings, behaviours and external factors. Idiographic network models are a relatively novel way of estimating such intra-individual psychological processes. These methods are not without limitations, and concerns have been raised about the stability and accuracy of estimated networks. The extend to which idiographic networks are stable, or vary over time, is unknown. We explored temporal network stability from three angles, exploring variation within people, across different stability metrics, and across people. We reanalysed daily symptom records of people with personality disorders. We fit graphical Vector Autoregressive models separately for the first and second 50 days of consecutive measurements. Contemporaneous but not temporal idiographic networks appeared to be relatively stable within people. The assessment of stability varied considerably across metrics applied. There was large variation in network stability of contemporaneous structures across people, which could not be explained by subject-specific variables. We illustrate the temporal changes in contemporaneous network structures of two participants with high and low network stability and discuss the most pressing questions to be considered by future research.Show less
