Mind the gap: quantifying population-individual gap in depressive symptom dynamics through energy landscapes (opens in new tab)

People do not always feel the way they appear. Someone who seems emotionally stable may be struggling internally, whereas someone who appears distressed may experience their state very differently. This gap matters in psychiatry, where assessment often relies on symptom scales and external evaluation. Here we developed a hierarchical variational Bayesian framework to jointly estimate population-derived dynamics, reflecting an external reference based on pooled data, and individual-derived dyn...