Research areas

• – Longitudinal modeling of emotion and cognition
• – Bayesian multilevel modeling

Methodological and/or psychotherapeutic expertise

• – Process models of emotion and cognition
• – Bayesian statistics

Short biography

My research program focuses on creating, applying, and disseminating innovative statistical and methodological tools for studying emotional and cognitive functioning across human development. Throughout, I have pursued three complementary research lines: (1) building multilevel models that capture individual differences in emotional and cognitive processes; (2) advancing high-frequency, longitudinal assessment methods that allow for clinical evaluation and testing of theoretical propositions, and (3) extending Bayesian methods to draw nuanced statistical inference.

Relevant publications

• Oravecz, Z., Wood, J., & Ram, N. (2018). On fitting a continuous-time stochastic process model in the Bayesian framework. In K. Van Montfort, J. H. L. Oud, & M. C. Voelkle (Eds.), Continuous Time Modeling in the Behavioral and Related Sciences (pp. 55–78). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77219-6_3
• Oravecz, Z., & Vandekerckhove, J. (2023). Quantifying evidence for—and against—Granger causality with Bayes factors. Multivariate Behavioral Research, 1-11.
• Heshmati, S., Muth, C., Roeser, R. W., Smyth, J., Jamalabadi, H., & Oravecz, Z. (2024). Conceptualizing psychological well-being as a dynamic process: Implications for research on mobile health interventions. Social and Personality Psychology Compass. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12933
• Li, Y., Williams, L., Muth, C., Chow, S.-M., & Oravecz, Z. (2024). A growth of hierarchical autoregression model for capturing individual differences in changes of dynamic characteristics of psychological processes. Structural Equation Modeling.

Relevant funded research projects

• - 2024 – 2028 “Multi-timescale process models to disentangle subtle cognitive decline and learning effects” (R01). Source of Funding: National Institute on Aging. Role: PI ($3,148,346).