Fuzzy Cognitive Maps for Impact Assessment in Psychological Research: Case Study of Psychological Well-being

Abstract

Assessing the impact of main factors on a given factor is important in various fields of psychological research. There are some methodological and statistical methods to tackle that problem. Recently, other methods and algorithms are being developed for this purpose. One of the methods is Fuzzy Cognitive Maps, which are recurrent neural network for modelling and simulations. The main advantage of this method is that it provides flexibility to model complex systems using causal relationships, thus allowing for what-if simulations. The key purpose of this paper is to introduce and apply this method in the Psychology field. More explicitly, this paper discusses this model in depth and applies it to a psychological well-being case study.