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Graphical Chain Models and Mental Disorders: An Application to Pathological Gambling
Author(s) -
Clelia Di Serio,
Biffi Sara
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
biometrical journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.108
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1521-4036
pISSN - 0323-3847
DOI - 10.1002/bimj.200210023
Subject(s) - pathological , graphical model , personality , psychology , anxiety , clinical psychology , cognitive psychology , computer science , artificial intelligence , psychiatry , social psychology , medicine , pathology
Abstract This paper demonstrates that graphical chain models are a suitable statistical tool for investigating the complex structure of a psychiatric disease. The article is motivated by a crucial question arising in psychometric studies on pathological gambling: how are depression and anxiety associated and how do they determine the personality of a pathological gambler? Starting from an initial recursive structure that reduces the complexity of the data, graphical chain models investigate both direct associations and indirect dependencies among the psychometric scales measuring the personality traits. A “behavioral chain” acting in pathological gambling is suggested by the final chain resulted from the Cox and Wermuth variables selection strategy (Cox and Wermuth, 1996). (© 2004 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)