Moriarity Daniel P, Alloy Lauren B
Temple University, United States.
Temple University, United States.
Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2021 Apr;123:72-82. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2021.01.008. Epub 2021 Jan 23.
Biological psychiatry is a major funding priority for organizations that fund mental health research (e.g., National Institutes of Health). Despite this, some have argued that the field has fallen short of its considerable promise to meaningfully impact the classification, diagnosis, and treatment of psychopathology. This may be attributable in part to a paucity of research about key measurement properties ("physiometrics") of biological variables as they are commonly used in biological psychiatry research. Specifically, study designs informed by physiometrics are more likely to be replicable, avoid poor measurement that results in misestimation, and maximize efficiency in terms of time, money, and the number of analyses conducted. This review describes five key physiometric principles (internal consistency, dimensionality, method-specific variance, temporal stability, and temporal specificity), illustrates how lack of understanding about these characteristics imposes meaningful limitations on research, and reviews examples of physiometric studies featuring a variety of popular biological variables to illustrate how this research can be done and substantive conclusions drawn about the variables of interest.
生物精神病学是资助心理健康研究的组织（如美国国立卫生研究院）的主要资金优先领域。尽管如此，一些人认为该领域未能充分兑现其对精神病理学的分类、诊断和治疗产生重大影响的承诺。这在一定程度上可能归因于对生物精神病学研究中常用生物变量的关键测量属性（“生理测量学”）的研究匮乏。具体而言，基于生理测量学的研究设计更有可能被复制，避免因测量不佳导致的错误估计，并在时间、金钱和进行的分析数量方面实现效率最大化。本综述描述了五个关键的生理测量学原则（内部一致性、维度性、方法特异性方差、时间稳定性和时间特异性），说明了对这些特征的缺乏理解如何对研究施加有意义的限制，并回顾了以各种流行生物变量为特色的生理测量学研究示例，以说明如何进行此类研究以及如何就感兴趣的变量得出实质性结论。
