Jack Andrews

🚨 1-year Research Assistant position 🚨

I’m delighted to share that my lab at Cardiff University is now recruiting a 1-year Research Assistant to work on a Wellcome funded project on the impacts of loneliness and social isolation on adolescents.

krb-sjobs.brassring.com/TGnewUI/Sear...

Anthropologists argue scales obscure structural distress, emphasizing individual flaws over context. Read analysis: www.cambridge.org/core/service... #MentalHealthResearch

Studying adolescent social isolation in school-based social networks: implications for health research Adolescent peer relationships matter profoundly for mental and physical health.1 2 Social isolation from peers (ie, a lack of connection) is associated with increased risk of mental health problems an...

✨ New publication!

Pleased to share a new commentary co-authored with @jackandrews.bsky.social. We explore how adolescent social isolation is conceptualised and measured in school-based social network research.

jech.bmj.com/content/earl...

👋 Good morning everyone, and a very warm Mental Elf welcome to the @resetproject.bsky.social conference in London.

You can follow along all day at
🌟 #ReSETMentalHealth 🌟

We are going to be talking about Relationships, Emotions & Adolescent Wellbeing.

I'm André - hello!

🧵 THREAD

Fellowship Application Day 2025 run online by @nihr-rss.bsky.social on 17 Sept - a REALLY important opportunity for anyone wanting to go for an NIHR Doctoral or Postdoctoral Award... and *free!* Not to be missed! 😀

mentalhealthresearch.org.uk/rss-fellowsh...

Cover of Coming Of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us by Lucy Foulkes. Out now in paperback

My book Coming Of Age: How Adolescence Shapes Us is out in paperback now

www.penguin.co.uk/books/451093...

Funded PhD opportunity with @sjblakemore.bsky.social and I, at Cambridge. We are looking for someone interested in developmental science, to start in the coming academic year. Please share it with anyone you think might be interested (see details attached 😁).
drive.google.com/file/d/1RIvg...

Are Adolescents Sensitive About Sensitive Data? Exploring Student Concerns About Privacy, Confidentiality, and Data Use in Health Research We quantitively explored adolescents' concerns about privacy, confidentiality, and data use in health research and their potential impact on the accur…

Are adolescents sensitive about sensitive data?

In our new @oxwell.bsky.social publication, we explore students' concerns about taking part in research including sensitive topics such as mental health & maltreatment.

Headlines below, w/ substantial implications for research design & analysis ⬇️

Job Opportunity at St George's University of London: Research Fellow in Social Epidemiology The Research Fellow will investigate young carers and health inequalities using advanced longitudinal quantitative methods. Responsibilities include data analysis, literature reviews, publishing findi...

I am hiring for a new researchers on my @nuffieldfoundation.org young carers project.
Closes 4thJune. After someone with strong quant longitudinal skills, passion for communicating research beyond academia & wants to work with people w lived experience/other sectors
jobs.sgul.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx...

Senior Researcher or Project Researcher (1-4 positions) The Faculty of Social Sciences, INVEST Flagship Research Centre at the University of Turku invites applications for 1-4 contract-based, fixed term Project researcher or Senior Researcher position from...

We’re hiring 1–4 researchers for ERC-funded projects on #bullying, #PeerRelations & #MentalHealth

💡 DWELL, (PI @sarahtmalamut.bsky.social) &
💡 SHADES (PI @tiinaturu.bsky.social )

🗓 Apply by 5 May 4 pm (Finnish time)
🔗 ats.talentadore.com/apply/erikoi...

#OpenVacancies #AcademicJobs #Psychology

The second paper of my PhD is now out in the world! It is a longitudinal study exploring if intolerance of uncertainty predicts generalised anxiety. Thanks to
@profhelendodd.bsky.social, @jmorriss.bsky.social, @hollyrayson.bsky.social for all your support doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2025.103004

Join our team at an exciting point for the
@resetproject.bsky.social as we disseminate the findings from our school-based, preventative mental health intervention for adolescents!

Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at King's College London Discover an exciting academic career path as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at jobs.ac.uk. Don't miss out on this job opportunity - apply today!

🚨 HIRING 🚨 a Postdoctoal Associate in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience @kingsioppn.bsky.social. My group's research aims to understand how social and physical environments impact brain and behaviour development.

www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DLX655/p...

Accepting applications until the 15th of March!

Department for Education. Effectiveness of school mental health awareness interventions Universal approaches in English secondary schools February 2025

Important new evidence published today: large-scale DofE trial (N=12,166) found that two universal MH awareness interventions, in secondary schools, led to an *increase* in emotional symptoms at long term (9-12 month) follow up

tinyurl.com/4ffday8y

Thread below

/1

Adolescent girls’ explanations of high rates of low mood and anxiety in their population: a co-produced qualitative study - BMC Women's Health Background From early adolescence, girls face greater risk of experiencing low mood and anxiety relative to boys, with recent evidence that this may be worsening. There is a paucity of mental health r...

We talk a lot about why adolescent girls report more low mood and anxiety, and why this might be getting worse.

But what do girls themselves think might explain this? As you might have guessed, we don’t really know.

So, we asked them: doi.org/10.1186/s129...

1/8

Should Australia mandate cancer warnings for alcoholic drinks? “Drink responsibly” messages have not stopped risky drinking. Some say we need cancer warnings on wine bottles and beer cans like we do on cigarette packs.

First post on Bluesky! Here @rvisontay.bsky.social and I present the case for cancer warning labels on alcoholic drinks in Australia:

theconversation.com/should-austr...

New paper! Adolescents more susceptible to anti-social influence on an experimental task reported lower compliance with future COVID social distancing rules. Prosociality also predicted future compliance, but less clear associations for other factors. OA Link: doi.org/10.1016/j.he...

How do you change the behaviour of the world?

Psychology found its way into Covid policy in several ways. But did it work? @jackandrews.bsky.social looked at the research…

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

[Figure 2 from the publication]: shows a network diagram of 18 different types of mental health support young people report accessing in the last year, alongside perceived helpfulness.

*Networks of care for the modern adolescent* 🫶🌻

In our new paper, we combine a #network approach + applied research lens to explore where #youngpeople are accessing #mentalhealth support & how helpful they find it.

w/ Simon R White & @minafazeloxford.bsky.social

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Signed! Could not imagine a better place to do a PhD than the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit.

Great to see this paper out led by the brilliant @drjillhalladay.bsky.social (see 🧵 below):

⭐️ Emotional problems predicted later alcohol use more-so than the reverse in adolescence

⭐ Depression-focused measures yielded more consistent associations with alcohol use than anxiety-focused measures

Examining the mental health outcomes of school-based peer-led interventions on young people: A scoping review of range and a systematic review of effectiveness Schools worldwide have implemented many different peer-led interventions with mixed results, but the evidence base on their effectiveness as mental health interventions remains limited. This study com...

These findings made me think of the importance of prosocial behaviour in peer led interventions for mental health. They often find better outcomes for those who are delivering the interventions, than those receiving them.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Fascinating study showing that people randomised to a self-kindness condition ended up reporting worse m/health. Those tasked with caring for others ended up with better m/h.

'These findings [...] suggest that self-kindness might not be as positive as it feels.'

psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Interested in mental health/young people's mental health? We have got post doc jobs out to advert now! www.bath.ac.uk/jobs/Vacancy... - this is part of the NIHR award to Bath, and the post doc opportunities are very exciting. Working potentially across work packages and getting training too!

In other words, we are better at recalling who likes us/each other when presented with self-relevant social networks, but who doesn't like each other when these networks have nothing to do with us.

We discuss this in relation to a need to belong, to identify social risks and to track social status

Our new study provides evidence for this hypothesis. That is, we are more accurate and faster at recalling social (e.g., friendship networks) vs. non-social network information (e.g., transport networks). We also observed a self-relevant positivity bias, but an ‘other’ negativity bias.

A lot of information in the world is relational and can be represented as a network, e.g., our friendships, or the tube map. We wanted to know if working memory has developed to better recall social vs. non-social network information. This might then help us to better navigate our social world.

A human working memory advantage for social network information | Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences As a social species, humans live in complexly bounded social groups. In order to navigate these networks, humans rely on a set of social–cognitive processes, including social working memory. Here, we ...

New paper out now in Proceedings of the Royal Society B:

'A human working memory advantage for social network information'.

w/Karina Grunewald & Susanne Schweizer

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...