Nigel Jaffe

(1/6) New pre-print alert! 🤩🚨

We provide new evidence for contra-hedonic functions of NSSI & ED behaviors in adolescents.

See 🧵 for a brief summary 👇
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Excellent new paper spearheaded by lab member @hadarfisher.bsky.social finding that emotion rigidity (assessed via EMA) in youth predicts future depressive symptoms over a 2 year follow-up.

🚨New paper on emotion rigidity as a risk factor for future depression out in BRAT!
Thank you to @christianwebb.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social and the awesome teddylab team @nigeljaffe.bsky.social, KristinaPidvirny, and Anna Tierney 🙌

Free 50d access: authors.elsevier.com/a/1lRqe1KMdl...

Tracking Psychopathology Dimensions Through Passive Smartphone Sensing Mental health researchers are increasingly using passively collected data from smartphones and wearable devices (eg, smartwatches, fitness trackers, and smart rings) to continuously and unobtrusively ...

🧠📱Excited to share our invited commentary in @jamanetworkopen.com on the promise and pitfalls of using smartphones (and wearables) to track psychopathology w/
@hadarfisher.bsky.social and linked to excellent paper by
@whitneyringwald.bsky.social, @aidangcw.bsky.social & team. tinyurl.com/5n8z4r6e

📱 Want to know when to schedule your #EMA / #ESM beeps for the highest completion rates?

⏰ Timing matters: some moments during the day and week are more receptive than others.

See: link.springer.com/article/10.3...

BREAKING: A federal judge reversed National Institutes of Health's terminations of hundreds of critical research grants that were canceled because of their alleged connection to disfavored topics, including diversity, equity, inclusion, and gender identity.

This is a major win for public health.

Both LLM-derived activation (daily texts) and passive sensing features (places visited ↑, time at home ↓) correlated significantly with self-reported activation —supporting their convergent validity.

While LLM ratings predicted immediate daily emotional changes (more positive, less negative affect), passive sensors (places visited (↑), time at home(↓))predicted weekly improvements in depression and anhedonia.

New paper from the lab testing whether passive📱smartphone data (like GPS and activity levels) and LLMs applied to teen texts can help us objectively measure behavioral change during behavioral activation therapy (led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social and @nigeljaffe.bsky.social). osf.io/preprints/ps...

Very excited about this new preprint, and grateful to our team!

Can we track therapeutic change outside the clinic?
In a new preprint, we explored whether digital tools - smartphone passive sensors📱 and LLM (GPT-4o) 🤖 - can track daily-life activation in adolescents with anhedonia receiving Behavioral Activation.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

And I’m one of them 🥹

Yay Shiba!!!! Big congrats!! :)

🚨 Now out in Emotion! 🚨
📄 psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
Grateful to all collaborators 🙏

U.S. college is first to decline federal science grants because of new DEI language Williams College says NSF and NIH requirement related to discrimination “undermines” academic freedom

Exclusive: Confusion over new DEI language from NSF and NIH leads Williams College to be first institution to pause accepting any grants www.science.org/content/arti...

Publishers Marketplace: Psychiatrist Awais Aftab’s REMAKING PSYCHIATRY, presenting new scientific and philosophical approaches that reshape our understanding of mental disorders, moving beyond the reductive debates between the biomedical and critical camps. Harvard University Press.

I’m writing a book for general readers presenting new scientific and philosophical approaches that reshape our understanding of mental disorders, and it will be published by Harvard University Press

Care about suicide research? Then you should care about how we measure suicide-related constructs! Very proud to share this viewpoint led by @kirstenchristensen.bsky.social, recently accepted at J Psychopathology and Clinical Science 🥳

osf.io/preprints/ps...

🚨New Postdoc Opportunity

We have an opening for a postdoc jointly mentored by
Justin Baker and me for work on digital therapeutics and passive sensing using smartphones and wearables (smartwatches + smart rings). More info 👉: webbslab.com/job-postings

Please RT & share!

Opinion | What Kennedy Gets Right, And Wrong, About Antidepressants (Gift Article) Harm from these drugs is real. Let’s not cede the conversation to Kennedy.

My opinion piece in today’s @nytimes.com . I discuss how clinical neglect of medication-related harms has made RFK Jr’s stance on antidepressants appealing to so many and moving the public conversation in a productive direction requires us to remedy this neglect.

www.nytimes.com/2025/05/03/o...

Fantastic work by Dr. Fisher using NLP to track emotions in teens! (more of her work coming soon using smartphone sensor mobility data and LLMs to track behavioral activation in teens)

1/7 Excited to share our new study "Using Natural Language Processing to Track Negative Emotions in the Daily Lives of Adolescents"! www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-6... We combine NLP and machine learning to monitor moment-to-moment mood changes in teens from their daily text.

Keep it coming!

Developing a qualitative and quantitative ambulatory assessment-based feedback system within cognitive behavioural interventions for people with persecutory beliefs Although the application of self-monitoring (ambulatory assessment) and visual feedback in psychological interventions has yielded promising results, …

For those who are interested ESM feedback, happy to announce that a new paper is out, in which we combine qualitative and quantitative feedback! Innovations include clock graphs, stacked graphs, and word clouds with sentences. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Great rec. Thanks for posting. To me he sounds so much like John Prine, it’s almost spooky.

Check out our new paper led by @chopwood.bsky.social out in American Psychologist!

We show clinicians want answers to within-person questions but clinical research mostly focus on between-person questions.

Let’s close the practice-research gap by doing more within-person work!

Translating clinical
psychology research to practice could improve mental health care but it is challenging. Researchers often frame the problem in terms of uptake failure by clinicians. But are they doing clinically useful research? In press, American psychologist

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Amazing!

Yay! That’s cool to hear. I’ll be going there this fall!

Excited to share that we now have a Bluesky account for the annual Suicide Research Symposium (@suicideresearchsym.bsky.social). This year's SRS is taking place this year on April 23 - 25, 2025. Registration is free, and the conference is entirely virtual, so check it out!