Poster: SOC Poster Session (Overflow 2) (In-person) on Monday, July 20, 2026, 11:00 AM
Room: Entresol 2
Thread: Learning and Teaching
Duration: 60 minutes
Chairs: Paula Goetz, Ellen O'Neill
Support: Özgün Çetinkaya
A Systems Dynamics Model of Mental Health During the Transition to Early Adulthood
Presenter: Fatima Waseem
Keywords: Psychology and Human Behavior
Mental health during the transition to early adulthood involves dynamic interactions among stress, perceived control, and general health that conventional statistical approaches cannot fully capture. Drawing on ten years of longitudinal pre-post survey data from first-year university students, this study develops a System Dynamics model to explain how feedback-driven processes generate distinct wellbeing trajectories across emotional, social, and psychological domains. Directional structure is informed by longitudinal structural equation modeling establishing that stress-related processes most strongly govern emotional wellbeing while agency- and capacity-based processes more strongly shape social and functional wellbeing. The SD model is organized around three interacting subsystems — stress-distress, control-engagement, and health-capacity — calibrated against observed cohort-level data and validated on held-out cohort years. Intervention simulations will examine whether targeting different system mechanisms produces differential effects across wellbeing domains, providing insight into why mental health interventions often succeed in some areas while producing limited effects in others.
Emotions as Dynamical, Self-Organizing Patterns of Salience: Knowing Other Minds Through Emotional Modelling
Presenter: Nicole Drudi
Keywords: Psychology and Human Behavior
This project addresses the epistemological problem of other minds from an enactivist and dynamical perspective. Traditional approaches generally conceive of minds as internal and therefore as only indirectly accessible to others. In contrast, this research proposes that emotions may provide a privileged framework through which mindedness itself becomes perceptible. Instead of understanding emotions as secondary internal mental states, the proposal is to conceive them as dynamical, self-organising patterns of salience emerging through organism-environment interactions. Because emotional dynamics are then publicly embodied through behaviour, affective attunement and interaction, they make some constitutive aspects of mindedness perceptible. This project argues that System Dynamics and complexity approaches are particularly suited to modelling these recursive emotional processes due to their non-linearity, feedback organisation and self-organising character. The project is thus interdisciplinary in nature, combining philosophy of mind, enactivism, affective science and System Dynamics. Its primary contribution at this stage is theoretical and conceptual: namely, to propose emotional salience as a bridge between phenomenology and formal modelling, while opening a new direction for the future application of System Dynamics to cognition, affectivity and the study of other minds.
Developing measures to gauge systems thinking and system dynamics skills in children and adolescent
Presenters: Saras Chung, Xinyuan Yu
Keywords: Learning and Teaching
The field of systems thinking and system dynamics (ST/SD) has grown with numerous efforts across the globe to scale learning earlier in elementary, middle, and high schools. Evidence of system dynamics skill attainment, however, is difficult to measure, and few reliable tools are available. This study proposes a comprehensive, developmentally appropriate survey assessment to gauge system dynamics skills of 5th to 12th-grade students. The assessment connects SD components with ST mental models through a hierarchical scale. Preliminary data were collected from a service-learning project at a St. Louis elementary school.
A Causal Loop Diagram for LGBTQIA+ Inclusive Evidence-Informed Practice Adoption by Teachers
Presenters: Shauntal Van Dreel, Saria Bechara, Grace DeHorn, Saras Chung
Keywords: Diversity and Ethics
Sexual and gender diverse adolescents (SGDA) experience heightened minority stress that contributes to poorer mental health outcomes than their heterosexual and cisgender peers. School-based inclusive evidence-informed practices (EIPs) can buffer these stressors and strengthen belonging, yet teacher adoption varies widely across schools. This work-in-progress applies a system dynamics and implementation science lens to understand the feedback processes shaping staff adoption of SGDA-inclusive practices. The causal loop diagram (CLD) in this study maps how teachers move from receiving inclusive practice training to adopting, sustaining, or de-adopting SGDA-inclusive evidence-informed practices, and how administrative support shapes these dynamics. The model was built from empirical literature and refined using study records and staff liaison interviews from 11 high schools implementing the Make Space intervention, identifying key inner- and outer-context factors influencing adoption and sustainment. Most systems science research on SGDA youth has focused on foster care and health care disparities, with limited attention to school-based implementation dynamics. Amid intensified sociopolitical pressures on SGDA-inclusive practices in U.S. K–12 schools, this work applies a system dynamics lens to examine how administrative support, teacher preparedness, peer visibility of inclusive practices, and internal and external pushback interact over time to shape adoption, sustainment, and belonging for SGDA students.
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Using tools to accelerate the development of quantitative modelling
Presenters: Madelon Geurts, Saskia Van den Berg, Etiënne Rouwette, Rick Prins, Guus Luijben
Keywords: Methodology
In the past, projects at our institute aiming to reach a quantitative model took a long time to complete. The transition from qualitative models to quantitative ones was hard and our institute wants to improve methods to be able to reach quantitative models adaptively and flexibly without sacrificing correctness of the model. We use the impact of climate on physical activity as a case study. This paper focuses on exploring different tools and software to improve quantitative modelling.
Tipping Points and Multi-system Interactions in the Acceleration of Sustainability Transitions
Presenters: Siti Indriani, Rob Raven, Cameron Allen
Keywords: Methodology
Research on sustainability transitions (STs) has increased considerably over the last two decades. Despite major scholarly progress and growing recognition of STs' scholarship in policy circles, a key question remains: how do transitions accelerate? Contemporary research on accelerating transitions frequently examines tipping points (TPs) in multi-system interactions (MSIs) as key mechanisms. However, as of today, there is limited understanding of the interplay between TPs, MSIs and acceleration in STs’ studies. Hence, the aim of this study is to clarify this relationship and identify a research gap on these three interconnected themes. The literature review findings indicate that despite growing attention to acceleration, TPs, and multi-MSIs in transition studies, the literature still leaves several important gaps. Four gaps found in the literature: (1) the limited theorisation of acceleration within STs’ frameworks; (2) the fragmented discussion of TPs and MSIs as separate mechanisms in the acceleration; (3) the lack of integrated modelling approaches that capture tipping and multi-system dynamics in accelerating STs; and (4) the limited research on acceleration in Global South contexts. Future research can further explore the study through modelling to simulate and analyse the interplay between TPs in the context of MSIs in accelerating STs.