Phillip Karl Wood

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Verified

Phillip verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of Missouri

Finite mixture models of longitudinal data frequently use growth models to identify trajectories of latent subgroups. Research using linear or quadratic growth mixture models has often replicated a four-group “cat’s cradle” pattern of subgroups as presented by McNeish et al. (2023). We argue that the “cat’s cradle” pattern is likely a statistical a...

In contemporary times, high-dimensional datasets have become increasingly prevalent, owing to the expansion and complexity of data collection facilitated by advancements in computer science, biology, and related fields. Analyzing such high-dimensional data poses distinct challenges compared to traditional data analysis, particularly in the realm of...

Introduction Rate of alcohol consumption, the speed with which people drink, has been linked to a range of outcomes, including alcohol use disorder symptoms and increased positive affect. However, minimal work has identified who is most likely to drink at elevated rates. Impulsivity is associated with increased attention to positive reinforcers spe...

The logistic and confined exponential curves are popular models of growth in such contexts as learning and technology transfer. Prior work (e.g., Grimm & Ram, 2009) has shown these curves, which are nonlinear in their parameters, can be estimated using structural equation modeling software. As an alternative to binary choice between the two models,...

Models considered in the current special issue represent valuable additions to the statistical toolbox of prevention researchers for many types of research questions and designs. Their appropriate use, however, depends on critical evaluation relative to previously existing techniques. This evaluation includes (a.) model choice involving "right-sizi...

Multi-group growth curve models in which the factor structure varies across classes can be used as the basis for growth mixture models. This paper considers a variety of growth curve and related models based on those presented in Wood, Steinley & Jackson (2015). Two general multi-group growth models are considered: Growth models, in which only fact...

Objective. To assess associations of student academic characteristics, communities-of-origin and high schools attended with pre-enrollment and collegiate alcohol consumption using university, census, and public school data.Participants. 2,740 first-time, freshman college students at a large, public, Midwestern university (54% female).Measures. Self...

Error variance in structural models is often specified as a conditional variance associated with a manifest variable or as a regression path from a standardized error variance. This paper describes scenarios in which specification of both terms is useful: (1) Corrections for attenuation in single indicator factor models; (2) Tests of the equality i...

We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youths ( Ns = 2,119, 303, and 592) for whom three informants reported on the youth’s psychopathology (e.g., child, parent, teacher). Empirical support for the p-factor diminished in multi-informant models compared with mono-informant mod...

Objective: Recent studies have examined the extent to which alcohol dependence (AD) criteria prospectively predict the course of AD. Critically, these studies have lacked a developmental perspective. However, the differential performance of criteria by age might indicate overendorsement in younger individuals. The current study examined AD criteri...

We used multitrait-multimethod (MTMM) modeling to examine general factors of psychopathology in three samples of youth (ns = 2119, 303, 592) for whom three informants reported on the youth’s psychopathology (e.g., child, parent, teacher). Empirical support for the p-factor diminished in multi-informant models compared with mono-informant models: th...

Aims To examine the acute effects of alcohol on Working Memory (WM) Updating, including potential variation across the ascending limb (AL) and descending limb (DL) of the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) time course. Design A two‐session experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to one of three beverage conditions (alcohol [males: 0...

An argument could be made that the proposed direction of effect suggested by a directional causality analysis is perhaps an artifact of violations of the regression models which underlie the approach. Identification of such artifacts depends critically, however, on the data and assumed measurement model under consideration. This chapter uses longit...

Background Developmental context is related to the propensity to engage in alcohol use, the rate at which alcohol use changes, and the relevance of different risk factors to alcohol use disorder (AUD). Therefore, studies of change should consider developmental nuances, but change is often modeled to follow a uniform pattern, even across distinct de...

Background: The p-factor is thought to cause a positive manifold in psychopathology data, and many researchers presume that it is a substantive mechanism as opposed to a methodological artifact. Limited research suggests that including completely undiagnosed cases (i.e., cases without a single diagnosis) affects the dimensionality of psychological...

Objective One of the promises of the experience sampling methodology (ESM) is that a statistical analysis of an individual's emotions, cognitions and behaviors in everyday-life could be used to identify relevant treatment targets. A requisite for clinical implementation is that outcomes of such person-specific time-series analyses are not wholly co...

Prior research has shown that sipping of alcohol begins to emerge during childhood and is potentially etiologically significant for later substance use problems. Using a large, community sample of 9- and 10-year-olds ( N = 11,872; 53% female), we examined individual differences in precocious alcohol use in the form of alcohol sipping. We focused ex...

Using complete enumeration (e.g., generating all possible subsets of item combinations) to evaluate clustering problems has the benefit of locating globally optimal solutions automatically without the concern of sampling variability. The proposed method is meant to combine clustering variables in such a way as to create groups that are maximally di...

Neuroimaging studies of subjects with ADHD typically show altered functional connectivity in prefrontal, striatal, and several temporal brain regions. While the majority of studies have focused on connectivity that is averaged over time, we investigated the temporal dynamics of brain network changes in resting-state fMRI. Using the ADHD-200 consort...

Increasingly, the structure of mental disorders has been studied in the form of a network, characterizing how symptoms or criteria interact with and influence each other. Many studies of psychiatric symptoms and diagnostic criteria employ community or population-based surveys using co-occurrence of the symptoms/criteria to form the networks. Howeve...

Existing trait mindfulness scales primarily assess mindfulness as it occurs outside interpersonal contexts. To more fully understand the possible relational benefits of mindfulness, the authors propose the construct of interpersonal mindfulness—mindfulness as it occurs during interpersonal interactions. The current work describes psychometric devel...

One of the promises of the experience sampling methodology (ESM) is that it could be used to identify relevant targets for treatment, based on a statistical analysis of an individual's emotions, cognitions and behaviors in everyday-life. A requisite for clinical implementation is that outcomes of person-centered analyses are not wholly contingent o...

Previous surveys indicate infrequent use of evidence-based treatment (EBT) manuals in usual care youth mental health, but the extent to which providers use core and common EBT strategies and what contextual factors impact EBT strategy implementation need further study. In a national, multidisciplinary survey of 1092 youth-serving providers, provide...

There is an extensive, albeit inconsistent, literature on the relation between parental alcoholism and offspring impulsive behavior. The reasons for this inconsistency are likely multiple but it seems probable that method effects due to different methodological approaches might explain some of the inconsistencies. Offspring behavior is typically as...

Considerable research has investigated the acute effects of alcohol on response inhibition, but a number of issues remain unresolved. Given that most studies use only a single laboratory task to assess inhibition, it is often difficult to determine whether alcohol’s effects are task specific or generalize across measures of the same construct. More...

Motivation to use alcohol to regulate positive and negative affect and deficits in cognitive control (i.e., executive functions [EFs]) have both been associated with increased alcohol involvement and alcohol-related consequences. Although dual-process models predict that affect-driven motivations and cognitive control should interact to determine a...

Rationale: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is highly associated with alcohol use disorder, but little is known about how BPD individuals consume alcohol or the immediate effects of their consumption. There is therefore a need for research investigating drinking behavior in BPD. Objectives: The current study examined rate of alcohol consump...

Background: Distinct changes in alcohol use etiologies occur during adolescence and young adulthood. Additionally, measured environments known to influence alcohol use such as peers and parenting practice can interact or be associated with this genetic influence. However, change in genetic and environmental influences over age, as well as how asso...

An individual's age at first substance use may be associated with their risk for progression toward heavier substance involvement. To our knowledge, however, no studies within nationally representative samples have examined the relation between the timing of initiation and progression in use of multiple substances. The present study employed a samp...

Intensive longitudinal studies, such as ecological momentary assessment studies using electronic diaries, are gaining popularity across many areas of psychology. Multilevel models (MLMs) are most widely used analytical tools for intensive longitudinal data (ILD). Although ILD often have individually distinct patterns of serial correlation of measur...

Aims: To compare the acute effects of alcohol on set-shifting task performance (relative to sober baseline performance) during ascending and descending limb breath alcohol concentration (BrAC), as well as possible moderation of these effects by baseline individual differences. Design: Shifting performance was tested during an initial baseline an...

Background: Individuals with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience a clinical course that is highly variable with daily fluctuations in symptoms significantly affecting functional ability and quality of life. Yet, understanding how MS symptoms co-vary and associate with physical and psychological health is unclear. Objective: The purpose of the stu...

Structural equation models can be used to specify models of growth and it changes over time. This chapter focuses on models with instantaneous reciprocal or auto causal effects which are characteristic of systems which involve reciprocal or self-referring loops. The effect of unincluded feedback loops on the parameters of causal models is qualitati...

Background: The comorbidity of borderline personality disorder (BPD) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is frequent, yet not well understood. The influence of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) in the development of this comorbidity has been a focus of prior clinical studies, but empirical evidence to generalize this focus to the broader populatio...

Prior neuroimaging studies have suggested that alterations in brain structure may be a consequence of cannabis use. Siblings discordant for cannabis use offer an opportunity to use cross-sectional data to disentangle such causal hypotheses from shared effects of genetics and familial environment on brain structure and cannabis use. To determine whe...

Amos, Lavaan, Mplus, and Ωnyx program examples can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/rightsizinglongitudinalmodels/longitudinalmplusexamples Arguments are proposed that researchers using longitudinal data should consider more and less complex statistical model alternatives to their initially chosen techniques in an effort to "right-size...

Individuals with borderline personality disorder (BPD) often report experiencing several negative emotions simultaneously, an indicator of "undifferentiated" negative affect. The current study examined the relationship between undifferentiated negative affect and impulsivity. Participants with a current BPD (n = 67) or depressive disorder (DD; n =...

Ecological momentary assessment was utilized to examine affective instability (AI) in the daily lives of outpatients with borderline personality disorder (BPD; N = 78), with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A psychiatric control group (n = 50) composed of outpatients with major depressive disorder/dysthymia (MDD/DYS) was employed t...

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is comorbid with substance use disorders (SUDs). However, most epidemiological work on BPD and SUDs has collapsed nonalcohol substances into a drug use disorder indicator, potentially obscuring patterns of association between BPD and individal SUDs. Using a nationally representative sample (National Epidemiolog...

As methodologists have increasingly noted, the role of psychometrics in operationalizing a construct is often overlooked when evaluating research claims (Borsboom, 2006). In a related vein, others have noted that psychological research appears to move away from assessment and interpretation of a single a priori statistical model to a more nuanced c...

There is some evidence that college student drinkers may continue drinking in the face of adverse consequences. We examined 2 hypotheses: (a) that this seemingly pathological behavior is a phenomenon of university life, occurring with consistency throughout the entirety of college, and (b) that individuals accumulate these consequences over multipl...

Measures of hangover are associated with current and future problematic alcohol use. At present, it is not known whether these associations reflect any direct influence of hangover events on near-term drinking behaviors. The current study aimed to determine whether hangover following a drinking episode influences time to next drink (TTND) and, if s...

Impulsivity is a core feature of many psychiatric disorders. Traditionally, impulsivity has been assessed using retrospective questionnaires or laboratory tasks. Both approaches neglect intraindividual variability in impulsivity and do not capture impulsivity as it occurs in real-world settings. The goal of the current study was to provide a method...

Alcohol use can be understood as a strategic behavior, such that people choose to drink based on the anticipated affective changes produced by drinking relative to those produced by alternative behaviors. This study investigated whether people who report drinking for specific reasons via the Drinking Motives Questionnaire-Revised (DMQ-R; Cooper, 19...

Objectives: Our aim was to determine if the decrease in drug use disorders with age is attributable to changes in persistence, as implied by the notion of maturing out. Also, we examined the association between role transitions and persistence, recurrence, and new onset of drug use disorders. Methods: We performed secondary analysis of the 2 wav...

Researchers studying longitudinal relationships among multiple problem behaviors sometimes characterize autoregressive relationships across constructs as indicating "protective" or "launch" factors or as "developmental snares." These terms are used to indicate that initial or intermediary states of one problem behavior subsequently inhibit or promo...

Cox, Clara, Worobec, and Grant (2012) recently presented results from a series of analyses aimed at identifying the factor structure underlying the DSM-IV-TR (APA, 2000) personality diagnoses assessed in the large NESARC study. Cox et al. (2012) concluded that the best fitting model was one that modeled three lower-order factors (the three clusters...

Background: There is evidence that measures of alcohol consumption, dependence and abuse are valid indicators of qualitatively different subtypes of alcohol involvement yet also fall along a continuum. The present study attempts to resolve the extent to which variations in alcohol involvement reflect a difference in kind versus a difference in deg...

This study provides estimates of the prevalence and demographic features of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in a community sample as well as BPD comorbidity rates with Axis I and II disorders. In addition, the authors provide data on general functioning and treatment seeking among individuals with BPD. Data from 34,481 participants in the Nat...

The current investigation tested whether low sensitivity to alcohol, as measured by the Self-Rating of the Effects of Alcohol (SRE) form, is associated with hangover occurrence or resistance, two potentially important predictors of later problematic drinking outcomes. Drinkers who reported using alcohol at least four times in the past month (N = 40...

Anger and affective instability are key features of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Given the dynamic nature of affect, it is ideally studied using ambulatory assessment (AA). Recently, several major studies have examined affective instability via momentary self-report, using electronic diaries, which participants can use throughout their da...

Tobacco and alcohol are frequently used together, and this may be partly explained by a distinct profile of subjective effects associated with co-administration. Ecological momentary assessment studies have examined effects of naturally occurring co-use, but, to date, have not assessed differing effects as alcohol levels rise and fall. The objectiv...

We examined the latent structure underlying the criteria for DSM-IV-TR (American Psychiatric Association, 2000, Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed., text revision). Washington, DC: Author.) personality disorders in a large nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. Personality disorder symptom data were collected us...

The current study develops an empirically determined classification of sexual orientation developmental patterns based on participants' annual reports of self-identifications, sexual attractions, and sexual behaviors during the first 4 years of college. A secondary aim of the current work was to examine trajectories of alcohol involvement among ide...

Although correlated changes between personality and alcohol involvement have been shown, the functional relation between these constructs is also of theoretical and clinical interest. Using bivariate latent difference score models, we examined transactional relations (i.e., personality predicting changes in alcohol involvement, which in turn predic...

Epidemiological studies have consistently demonstrated that heavy alcohol use and alcohol dependence (AD) tend to increase in adolescence and emerging adulthood and then show a large decline in the late 20s, a phenomenon called maturing out. This decline has been explained as an effect of "role incompatibility" in which involvement in new roles and...

Prior efforts to examine the course of drinking from onset to midlife have been limited to analyses of year-to-year changes in alcohol dependence (AD). The current investigation sought to examine the course of drinking over this time frame using consumption-based measures of drinking and evaluate the degree of comparability in trajectories estimate...

Alcohol use may be viewed as an attempt (albeit maladaptive) to regulate negative emotional states. We examined associations between both negative and positive affects and alcohol use in outpatient women diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD; n=74), a prototype of emotional dysregulation, as well as a psychiatric control group of wome...

The Hangover Symptoms Scale (HSS) assesses the frequency of 13 symptoms experienced after drinking in the past year. Cross-sectional analyses in college drinkers showed preliminary evidence for the validity of the HSS (Slutske et al., 2003). The current investigation extended this work by examining the construct validity of the HSS in an ecological...

Alcohol dependence and Comorbid Personality Disorders: antisocial and borderline symptom analysis

Alcohol is known to impair self-regulatory control of behavior, though mechanisms for this effect remain unclear. Here, we tested the hypothesis that alcohol's reduction of negative affect (NA) is a key mechanism for such impairment. This hypothesis was tested by measuring the amplitude of the error-related negativity (ERN), a component of the even...

Clinical and population-based samples show high comorbidity between Substance Use Disorders (SUDs) and Axis II Personality Disorders (PDs). However, Axis II disorders are frequently comorbid with each other, and existing research has generally failed to distinguish the extent to which SUD/PD comorbidity is general or specific with respect to both s...

Alcohol and tobacco use covary at multiple levels of analysis, and co-use of the 2 substances may have profound health consequences. To characterize the motivationally relevant processes contributing to co-use, the current study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine the subjective consequences of naturally occurring simultaneous use...

Partridge and Lerner (2007), in a secondary analysis of the New York Longitudinal Study, employed a chronometric polynomial growth curve model to argue that the developmental course of difficult temperament follows a non-linear trajectory over the first 5 years of life. The free curve slope intercept (FCSI) growth curve model of Meredith and Tisak...

In this paper we propose the concept of structural similarity as a relaxation of blockmodeling in social network analysis. Most previous approaches attempt to relax the constraints on partitions, for instance, that of being a structural or regular ...

To examine the relation of changes in Five-Factor personality traits (i.e., extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience; Costa & McCrae, 1985), drinking motives, and problematic alcohol involvement in a cohort of college students (N=467) at varying risk for alcohol use disorders from ages 21 to 35. Parall...

We applied different diagnostic rules for diagnosing personality disorders to the NESARC epidemiological study of over 40,000 individuals. Specifically, unlike previous NESARC publications, we required that each personality disorder criterion be associated with significant distress or impairment in order to be counted toward a personality disorder...

A sample of college students, oversampled for smoking (N = 127, 43% smokers), monitored their daily experiences using electronic diaries over 14 days. We examined the frequency and correlates of liberally defined hangoverlike experiences (HLEs) using data from 1,595 person-days (1,325 after abstention from drinking and 270 after drinking, including...

Recent research has indicated that developmental changes in the personality traits of neuroticism and impulsivity correlate with changes in problem drinking during emerging and young adulthood. However, it remains unclear what potential mechanisms, or mediators, could account for these associations. Drinking motives, particularly drinking to regula...

NEW MARC PROJECT 6: Ecological Momentary Assessment of Emotion Regulation

Alcohol use disorder-personality disorder comorbidity: Reanalysis of NESARC data

Although it has been recognized that the course of alcoholism may differ across individuals, little work has characterized drinking trajectories from drinking onset to midlife. The current study examined trajectories of alcohol dependence from adolescence to the mid-50s in a sample of 420 men with a lifetime diagnosis of alcohol dependence. Men fro...

Kindergarten to 3(rd) grade mathematics achievement scores from a prospective study of mathematical development were subjected to latent growth trajectory analyses (n = 306). The four corresponding classes included children with mathematical learning disability (MLD, 6% of sample), and low (LA, 50%), typically (TA, 39%) and high (HA, 5%) achieving...

Traditional self-report measures of psychopathology may be influenced by a variety of recall biases. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) reduces these biases by assessing individuals' experiences as they occur in their natural environments. This study examines the discrepancy between trait questionnaire, retrospective report, and EMA measures of...

Heavy drinkers prior to college have been shown to increase their drinking in college via their self-selection into the Greek societies and subsequent Greek influence on their drinking. This study characterized the dual mechanisms underlying these processes: (a) the Greek selection on the basis of personality and precollege drinking and (b) the Gre...

Problematic alcohol involvement typically peaks in the early 20s and declines with age. This maturing out of alcohol involvement is usually attributed to individuals attaining adult statuses incompatible with heavy drinking. Nevertheless, little is known about how changes in problematic alcohol use during emerging/early adulthood relate to changes...

Alcohol and drug uses are common in today's society and it is well-known that they can lead to serious consequences. Studies have been conducted in order, for example, to understand short-or long-term tem-poral processes of alcohol and drug uses. This paper discusses statistical modeling for joint analysis of alcohol and drug uses and several model...

Many college entrants' parents do not have college degrees. These entrants are at high risk for attrition, suggesting it is critical to understand mechanisms of attrition relative to parental education. Moderators and mediators of the effect of parental education on attrition were investigated in 3,290 students over 4 years. Low parental education...

A genetic factor model is introduced for decomposition of group differences of the means of phenotypic behavior as well as individual differences when the research variables under consideration are ordered categorical. The model employs the general Genetic Factor Model proposed by Neale and Cardon (Methodology for genetic studies of twins and famil...

Temporal instability of affect is a defining characteristic of psychological disorders such as borderline personality disorder (BPD) and mood cycling disorders. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) enables researchers to directly assess such frequent and extreme fluctuations over time. The authors examined 4 operationalizations of such temporal in...

Student attrition at colleges across the United States poses a significant problem for students and families, higher educational institutions, and the nation's workforce competing in the global economy. Heavy drinking is a highly plausible contributor to the problem. However, there is little evidence that it is a reliable predictor of attrition. No...

Ecological momentary assessment (EMA; Stone & Shiffman, 1994) was used to characterize and quantify a dynamic process--affective instability in borderline personality disorder (BPD). Sixty outpatients (34 with BPD and affective instability; 26 with current depressive disorder but not with BPD or affective instability) carried electronic diaries for...

We present a new iterative method for probabilistic clustering of data. Given clusters, their centers and the distances of data points from these centers, the probability of cluster membership at any point is assumed inversely proportional to the distance ...

For many college students, Friday class schedules may contribute to weekend-like drinking behaviors beginning on Thursday. This study characterizes college students' daily alcohol consumption patterns and the relation between Thursday drinking and Friday classes overall and for specific vulnerable groups. A sample of 3,341 volunteer participants wa...

Personality traits related to neuroticism and disinhibition have been consistently associated with substance use disorders (SUDs). It is unclear, however, whether different personality traits predict distinct forms of substance dependence. Additionally, it is unclear whether personality traits continue to predict alcohol, drug, and tobacco dependen...

The factor structure of the Velicer Attitudes Toward Violence Scale [VATVS; Velicer, Huckel and Hansen, 1989] was examined in three studies. Study 1 (n=460 undergraduates) found a poor fit for a hierarchical five-factor model earlier advanced by Velicer et al. [1989], but a good fit for an oblique four-factor model. In Study 2, this alternative mod...

Identifying differing developmental trajectories of alcohol behavior is fundamental in building theories of alcoholism etiology and course. The purpose of this study was to identify differences in developmental pathways of alcoholism from onset of drinking into middle adulthood. Alcohol-related behaviors and psychiatric status were assessed in 330...

Objective: Identifying differing developmental trajectories of alcohol behavior is fundamental in building theories of alcoholism etiology and course. The purpose of this study was to identify differences in developmental pathways of alcoholism from onset of drinking into middle adulthood. Method: Alcohol-related behaviors and psychiatric status we...

We investigated mediational relations among trauma, dissociation, psychopathology (e.g., PTSD, borderline personality disorder, bulimic behaviors), and fears about death and lacking control in a sample of 325 non-treatment-seeking women. With the use of structural equation modeling, findings indicated that: (1) dissociation accounted for 27% of var...