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Modeling synergy: How to assess a Type D personality effect

Lodder,P.
Abstract
Objective In research on Type D personality, its subcomponents negative affectivity (NA) and social inhibition (SI) are hypothesized to have a synergistic effect on various medical and psychosocial outcomes. As some methods to analyze Type D personality have been criticized, this study investigated whether these methods adequately detect a Type D effect. Method We used a simulation and two empirical illustrations to investigate each method's performance (bias, power and false positives) in detecting the Type D effect. Results Our simulation showed that the two most commonly used methods to assess the Type D effect (subgroup methods) were primarily picking up the presence of NA or SI main effects, indicating that these methods might falsely suggest synergistic Type D effects. Moreover, these methods failed to detect the combined presence of the NA and SI main effects, resulting in significant Type D effects when only one of the NA/SI main effects was present. The method that best detected Type D effects modeled the continuous NA/SI main effects and their statistical interaction in a regression analysis. Reanalysis of two empirical Type D personality datasets confirmed the patterns found in our simulation. Conclusion This study showed that Type D effects should be modeled with a continuous interaction approach. Other approaches showed either more bias, more false positive findings or lower power. We recommend against using subgroup approaches to operationalize Type D personality, as these methods are biased, regardless of whether the Type D effect is synergistic or additive in nature.
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2020
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Tilburg University Research Output Collection
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Keywords
ALL-CAUSE MORTALITY, CARDIAC EVENTS, CORONARY-ARTERY-DISEASE, Dichotomization, Interaction, NEGATIVE AFFECTIVITY, OUTCOMES, PREDICTIVE-VALUE, PROGNOSTIC VALUE, PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS, SOCIAL INHIBITION, Simulation, Synergy, Type D personality, VARIABLES
Citation
Lodder, P 2020, 'Modeling synergy : How to assess a Type D personality effect', Journal of Psychosomatic Research, vol. 132, 109990. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpsychores.2020.109990
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https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14602/73159
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info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
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