project proposal
Introduction
Why did I choose this project?
The paper directly relates to my interests in emotional awareness and mental health. It explores the connection between alexithymia (difficulty identifying and describing emotions, as well as an externally oriented thinking style) and depression. It is important for me to understand the extent to which alexithymia correlates with mental health, and I am particularly curious about this connection in subclinical populations. Additionally, the project has interesting analysis, and I would like to learn how to do that.
A description of the stimuli and procedures that will be required to conduct this experiment, and what the challenges will be.
I will recruit participants through Prolific and ask them to complete the alexithymia (TAS-20), depression (BDI-I), and demographics questionnaires.
The original study recruited 939 participants and conducted various analyses such as: Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, the “Extended Bayesian Information Criterion” (EBIC), the “Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator” (LASSO) regularization method, and related network analyses.
The study should not take too long, but I am concerned that my sample size may be smaller due to the cost involved in participant recruitment. The biggest challenges in replicating this project may arise from the fact that the analyses conducted in the original paper likely required a larger sample size, and the population I recruit may end up being more subclinical.