Introduction
Hey, I'm a PhD Candidate with the psychological methods group at the University of Amsterdam. There I'm affiliated with the Theory Methods Lab and the Center for Urban Mental Health.
My primary interest is how studies of mathematically built complex systems can help us understand human thoughts and behaviors. I'm working on the topics of urban mental health and theory construction. I also try to keep up with developments in meta science and methods.
I'm lucky to have received a multitude of perspectives through my three formal educations: philosophy (BA), cognitive science (BA), and psychology (Research MA). And through my three current supervisors: Denny Borsboom, Sacha Epskamp, and Han van der Maas.
Feel free to contact me through Twitter or mail: adam.finnemann [at] gmail [dot] com
I'm lucky to have received a multitude of perspectives through my three formal educations: philosophy (BA), cognitive science (BA), and psychology (Research MA). And through my three current supervisors: Denny Borsboom, Sacha Epskamp, and Han van der Maas.
Feel free to contact me through Twitter or mail: adam.finnemann [at] gmail [dot] com
Scientific output
Articles**
Finnemann, A., Huth, K. B., van den Ende, M. W., & Sloot, P. M. (2022). No robust relation between larger cities and depression. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(2).
Koelen, J. A., Mansueto, A. C., Finnemann, A., de Koning, L., van der Heijde, C. M., Vonk, P., ... & Wiers, R. W. (2021). COVID‐19 and mental health among at‐risk university students: A prospective study into risk and protective factors. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research, e1901.
van Dongen, N., van Bork, R., Finnemann, A., van der Maas, H., Robinaugh, D., Haslbeck, J., ... & Borsboom, D. (2022). Improving Psychological Explanations.
**Link to Google Scholar.
Blog posts
Is Academic Acceleration Leaving Peer Review in the Dust?
Blog on generalised additive models and geom_smooth().
Talks
A Mayor’s Depression: Do mental health disorders scale with city size?
- Presented at the 2021 Conference on Complex Systems
An Urban Desirability paradox? A Large Scale Study of UK Urban Psychology
- Presented at the 2022 IOPS Conference
Resources
Here I have gathered some of my favorite resources with brief explanations. In general, they present simple yet powerful ideas which are helping me to think about the world.
These two blog posts by Denny Borsboom capture elegantly the crux, necessity, and power of viewing psychological research and constructs through the lens of systems thinking.
Systems thinking in psychology
Dodging the magic bullet
How do we become systems thinkers? I think one answer lies in the existence of system archetypes: common structures that produce a characteristic behavior. Self-reinforcing feedback loops producing exponential growth (dynamics of diseases and populations etc.) is an example of a system archetype. In my Ising Paper, I argue that a many-body system with pairwise alignment produces a characteristic cusp behavior.
The cusp catastrophe model summarising Ising dynamics
Other cool system archetypes:
Robinaugh et al. (preprint) connect two feedback loops on different timescales (one slow, one fast) to model panic disorder. I think that's a neat system archetype.
Wittenborn et al. (2015) use the modular feature of feedback models, meaning, we can repeatedly piece feedback loops together into larger structures. Doing so, they integrate the myriad of factors related to depression into a comprehensive model.
Axelrod's model of cultural evolution captures a universal feedback between who we are and who we interact with. It rests on two universal ideas 1) we interact with individuals that are similar to ourselves (homophily), and 2) during the interactions we become more similar. A classic example is how we speak to people of similar language thereby aligning our speech patterns. Repeating this behavior in a large population it's easy to show how different cultures emerge (see model 10 in Alex Mesoudi's great tutorial with model implementation in R).
