Early warning signals in psychopathology: what do they tell?
- PDF / 798,103 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 98 Downloads / 190 Views
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Early warning signals in psychopathology: what do they tell? Marieke J. Schreuder1* , Catharina A. Hartman1, Sandip V. George1, Claudia Menne-Lothmann2, Jeroen Decoster3,4, Ruud van Winkel3,5, Philippe Delespaul2,6, Marc De Hert3,5,7, Catherine Derom8,9, Evert Thiery10, Bart P. F. Rutten2, Nele Jacobs2,11, Jim van Os2,12,13, Johanna T. W. Wigman1 and Marieke Wichers1
Abstract Background: Despite the increasing understanding of factors that might underlie psychiatric disorders, prospectively detecting shifts from a healthy towards a symptomatic state has remained unattainable. A complex systems perspective on psychopathology implies that such symptom shifts may be foreseen by generic indicators of instability, or early warning signals (EWS). EWS include, for instance, increasing variability, covariance, and autocorrelation in momentary affective states—of which the latter was studied. The present study investigated if EWS predict (i) future worsening of symptoms as well as (ii) the type of symptoms that will develop, meaning that the association between EWS and future symptom shifts would be most pronounced for congruent affective states and psychopathological domains (e.g., feeling down and depression). Methods: A registered general population cohort of adolescents (mean age 18 years, 36% male) provided ten daily ratings of their affective states for 6 consecutive days. The resulting time series were used to compute EWS in feeling down, listless, anxious, not relaxed, insecure, suspicious, and unwell. At baseline and 1-year follow-up, symptom severity was assessed by the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90). We selected four subsamples of participants who reported an increase in one of the following SCL-90 domains: depression (N = 180), anxiety (N = 192), interpersonal sensitivity (N = 184), or somatic complaints (N = 166). Results: Multilevel models showed that EWS in feeling suspicious anticipated increases in interpersonal sensitivity, as hypothesized. EWS were absent for other domains. While the association between EWS and symptom increases was restricted to the interpersonal sensitivity domain, post hoc analyses showed that symptom severity at baseline was related to heightened autocorrelations in congruent affective states for interpersonal sensitivity, depression, and anxiety. This pattern replicated in a second, independent dataset. (Continued on next page)
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Psychiatry, Interdisciplinary Center Psychopathology and Emotion regulation (ICPE), University of Groningen, University Medical Center Groningen, Internal Postal Code: CC72, Triade Building Entrance 24, Hanzeplein 1, 9713 GZ Groningen, The Netherlands Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit
Data Loading...
