Personalized network modeling in psychopathology: The importance of contemporaneous and temporal connections

Recent literature has introduced (1) the network perspective to psychology, and (2) collection of time-series data in order to capture symptom fluctuations and other time varying factors in daily life. Combining these trends allows for the estimation of intra-individual network structures. We argue that these networks can be directly applied in clinical research and practice as hypothesis generating structures. Two networks can be computed: a temporal network, in which one investigates if symptoms (or other relevant variables) predict one another over time, and a contemporaneous network, in which one investigates if symptoms predict one another in the same window of measurement. The contemporaneous network is a partial correlation network, which is emerging in the analysis of cross-sectional data but is not yet utilized in the analysis of time-series data. We explain the importance of partial correlation networks and exemplify the network structures on time-series data of a psychiatric patient.