Understanding social adversity and stress and mood symptoms: The Bayesian network approach

Abstract

Social adversity events commonly occur in our daily lives. However, an individual's perception of social adversity experienced may be more important than actual events in impacting an individual's psychological functioning and reactions. In the current study, we examined how individuals' perception of social adversity events they experienced is associated with their traumatic stress symptoms as well as mood and anxiety symptoms using the Bayesian network model. The findings indicated that individuals with a perception of social adversity events as traumatic and frequent showed an increase in the probability of displaying a high level of posttraumatic stress symptoms.

Keywords: Bayesian network; causal link; individuals’ perception; social adversities; traumatic stress symptoms.