Multiverse analyses in fear conditioning research

A data multiverse analysis investigating non‐model based SCR quantification approaches

“…Of note, also the data multiverse inevitably implies a multiverse of statistical results given that the same statistical models are applied to differently processed data that however are derived from identical raw data. This has been highlighted for psychology in general (Silberzahn et al, 2018;Steegen et al, 2016) and for fear-conditioning research in particular (Lonsdorf et al, 2022;Lonsdorf, Klingelhöfer-Jens, et al, 2019;. To this end, multiverse-style data analyses can be considered a large set of systematic robustness analyses that apply different (equally justifiable) processing pipelines to the same data set.…”

“…Written informed consent was obtained from all participants and the project was approved by the local ethics committee (PV 5157, Ethics Committee of the General Medical Council Hamburg). Data analyzed here have been included as a case example on a different methodological question (i.e., exclusion of 'non-learners' and 'non-responders') in our previous publication (Lonsdorf, Klingelhöfer-Jens, et al, 2019), our recent related work on a direct comparison of different SCR response quantification approaches (Kuhn et al, 2022) as well as an exemplary data set for the development of a methods multiverse package for the software package R (Lonsdorf et al, 2022).…”

“…Even though the paradigm used can be considered quite representative of the field, this is a question that future studies should address. We also refer the interested reader to recent discussions on the potentials and challenges of the multiverse approach in fear-conditioning research (Kuhn et al, 2022;Lonsdorf et al, 2022).…”

Robust group- but limited individual-level (longitudinal) reliability and insights into cross-phases response prediction of conditioned fear

“…For this purpose, we reanalyzed data from 120 participants that underwent a differential fear conditioning paradigm twice (at time points T0 and T1, 6 months apart) – with habituation and acquisition training on day 1 and extinction, reinstatement and reinstatement-test on day 2 to allow for fear memory consolidation prior to extinction. Part of the data have been used previously in method focused work ( Kuhn et al, 2022 ; Lonsdorf et al, 2022 ; Lonsdorf et al, 2019a ; Sjouwerman et al, 2022 ) and work investigating the association of conditioned responding with brain morphological measures ( Ehlers et al, 2020 ).…”

“…All hypotheses are tested across different pre-registered data specifications to account for procedural heterogeneity in the literature (see Supplementary file 1 ): More precisely, we follow a pre-registered multiverse-inspired approach and include (1) responses to the CS+, CS−, US, and CS discrimination, (2) different phase operationalizations, (3) different data transformations none, log-transformed, log-transformed and range-corrected, and (4) ordinally ranked vs. non-ranked data (for justification of these choices, see Table 1 ). We acknowledge that the specifications used here are not intended to cover all potentially meaningful combinations as in a full multiverse study ( Lonsdorf et al, 2022 ; Sjouwerman et al, 2022 ; Steegen et al, 2016 ) but can be viewed as a manyverse ( Kuhn et al, 2022 ) in which we a priori pre-registered a number of meaningful combinations.…”