Hi Gang,
I have a few questions about setting up 3dLME. I have two within-subjects variables (Condition: Standard vs. Reward; and Emotion: Happy vs. Neutral) and one continuous covariate of interest (anxiety severity). I also want to control for four covariates of non-interest: age, race (non-white vs. white), IQ and gender.
Here are my questions:
- As I understand LMEs, I need to include random slopes for the two sources of non-independence, namely the two within-subjects variables (Condition and Emotion). However, previous discussions on the message board seem to suggest that I should only model the random intercept, and that I would only include a random slope if the within-subjects variable changed for each subject in each condition (e.g., reaction times). First, should I only estimate a random intercept? And if so, how does the model account for the non-independence caused by the repeated measures of Condition and Emotion?
- I’m mainly interested in the interactions involving anxiety (Cond:Anx, Emo:Anx, and Cond:Emo:Anx). These are automatically generated by the model. However, I’m also interested in the effect of anxiety at each of the within-subject levels. To model these effects, I ran the four GLTs below. Is that what I’m modeling? Or am I modeling, for example, the effect of the standard condition at the average anxiety score?
Here’s my current script:
3dLME \
-prefix LME.nii \
-jobs 4 \
-mask mask.group_anat.nii \
-model "Cond*Emo*Anx+age+race+IQ+gen" \
-qVars 'Anx,age,race,IQ,gen' \
-qVarCenters '23.3,32.94,0,97.65,0' \
-ranEff '~1' \
-SS_type 3 \
-num_glt 4 \
-gltLabel 1 'Standard_Anx' -gltCode 1 'Cond : 1*Standard Anx : ' \
-gltLabel 2 'Reward_Anx' -gltCode 2 'Cond : 1*Reward Anx : ' \
-gltLabel 3 'Happy_Anx' -gltCode 3 'Emo : 1*Happy Anx : ' \
-gltLabel 4 'Neutral_Anx' -gltCode 4 'Emo : 1*Neutral Anx : ' \
-dataTable \
Subj Cond Emo Anx age race IQ gen InputFile \
s1 Standard Happy 13 45 -0.5 109 -0.5 stats.s1.nii'[Standard_Happy_GLT#0_Coef]' \
s2 Standard Happy 22 35 -0.5 117 -0.5 stats.s2.nii'[Standard_Happy_GLT#0_Coef]' \
...
s1 Standard Neutral 13 45 -0.5 109 -0.5 stats.s1.nii'[Standard_Neutral_GLT#0_Coef]' \
s2 Standard Neutral 22 35 -0.5 117 -0.5 stats.s2.nii'[Standard_Neutral_GLT#0_Coef]' \
...
s1 Reward Happy 13 45 -0.5 109 -0.5 stats.s1.nii'[Reward_Happy_GLT#0_Coef]' \
s2 Reward Happy 22 35 -0.5 117 -0.5 stats.s2.nii'[Reward_Happy_GLT#0_Coef]' \
...
s1 Reward Neutral 13 45 -0.5 109 -0.5 stats.s1.nii'[Reward_Neutral_GLT#0_Coef]' \
s2 Reward Neutral 22 35 -0.5 117 -0.5 stats.s2.nii'[Reward_Neutral_GLT#0_Coef]' \
...