Interested in research on depression in youth? New opening for a full-time research assistant in our lab (webbslab.com) to work on a range of projects focused on the causes & treatment of depression in teens. Come join our growing lab. Please RT and share! Apply⬇️ webbslab.com/job-postings

Honored to have our work recognized by @bbrfoundation.bsky.social, alongside many colleagues doing important work in the field.

Lab dinner with the growing team! 🎉 Thrilled to welcome new postdocs Poorvesh Dongre and Francesca Morfini. Very grateful to work with this brilliant and dedicated group every day.

Join us next week at the Technology in Psychiatry Summit #TIPS2025! Dec 11–12 | Virtual | 11AM–5PM ET 💡 Topics: • AI-driven mental health apps • LLMs in dementia caregiving • Digital Navigators bridging tech + care • AI for eating-disorder treatment ...& much more 🔗 tips.societyconference.com/v2/

Great work on this meta-analysis Hadar!

💫 Excited to share new preprint a systematic review & meta-analysis of 123 studies (40k+ ppl) on how well language-based models detect depression from text. www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-8...

Join us at the Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS) #TIPS2025! Dec 11–12 | Virtual | 11 AM–5 PM ET 💡 Topics: • AI-driven mental health apps • LLMs in dementia caregiving • Digital Navigators bridging tech + care • AI for eating-disorder treatment ...& much more 🔗 tips.societyconference.com/v2/

Check out this write-up of a recent DPN article from @bbrfoundation.bsky.social highlighting BBRF awardees @christianwebb.bsky.social, @erika-forbes.bsky.social, and @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social. Congrats! bbrfoundation.org/content/smar...

Thanks to @bbrfoundation.bsky.social for highlighting our lab's study (led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social & @nigeljaffe.bsky.social) using📱smartphone sensors + LLM-derived text ratings to track behavioral activation and symptom change in teens with anhedonia. bbrfoundation.org/content/smar...

📢 New large study of ~1.5 million patients in NHS Talking Therapies finds that teens/young adults (ages 16-24) had 17-26% *lower* odds of reliably improving vs 25-65 year-olds. Time to rethink youth-centred mental-health delivery? 🔗 tinyurl.com/532y6v67

Great work Hadar!

Now out in NPP – Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience! 📱🧠 Can LLMs and smartphone sensing help us track therapy progress in real time?

🆕 study by @hadarfisher.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social @christianwebb.bsky.social tested whether smartphone mobility sensing & LLM ratings of text can track behavioral activation in teens to boost engagement in rewarding activities www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Grateful to @willemkuyken.bsky.social for being such a gracious host and insightful guide at Oxford — and to Jamie Delgadillo for the same at King’s College London. Inspiring conversations, wonderful campuses, and a fantastic trip all around. 🇬🇧🎓

"Dr. Balfour Mount, who coined the term 'palliative care' and whose profound empathy helped revolutionize health-care in North America, died peacefully on Sept. 25 at the palliative care unit that bears his name." www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

@mcleanhospital.bsky.social Technology in Psychiatry Summit #TIPS returns this year Dec 11-12. We have exciting keynotes lined up, including Drs. Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab), Isaac Galatzer-Levy (Google DeepMind), and Derrick Hull (Slingshot AI). Submissions are now open. See below for info.

📱EMA is increasingly used in intervention studies to acquire a more fine-grained and ecologically valid assessment of change. But EMA is relatively burdensome. What's the added value? We tried to address this question in our new paper now out @jmirpub.bsky.social www.jmir.org/2025/1/e69297 1/n

There is still time to submit your symposium, workshop, or poster for the 2025 Technology in Psychiatry Summit (TIPS). Submission deadline is Oct 9. TIPS is taking place virtually as a 2-day meeting Dec 11th and 12th, 2025. #TIPS #technologyinpsychiatry Link: techinpsych.org

🚨 New research alert We applied machine learning to the large MYRIAD trial (84 schools and 8,376 UK teens) to ask: 👉 Which adolescents benefit most from mindfulness delivered in schools? Bottom line: One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. Paper link: tinyurl.com/vvpvfunh 1/n

🚨 New research alert We applied machine learning to the large MYRIAD trial (84 schools and 8,376 UK teens) to ask: 👉 Which adolescents benefit most from mindfulness delivered in schools? Bottom line: One-size-fits-all doesn’t work. Paper link: tinyurl.com/vvpvfunh 1/n

My lab has an open post-doc position! We will begin reviewing applications as they come in. The post-doc will work with a vibrant research team at Penn State in the Department of Psychology and the Child Study Center. psu.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/PSU_Academic... 1/3

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.

For those interested in the target paper, see here for the link (it's open access). We use a much larger sample than is typical, that is clinically heterogeneous, and examines associations bw passive sensing and broad domains of psychopathology jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

Check out our thoughts on the growing use of passive sensing for digital phenotyping. In this commentary, we reflect on excellent work by @whitneyringwald.bsky.social et al., who use a large, clinically heterogeneous sample to examine assoc. bw passive sensing and domains of psychopathology.

Thoughtful summary of the promise and limitations of passive sensing >>

🧠📱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

And @christianwebb.bsky.social on predictions of negative affect states from mobile phenotyping data and machine learning models. "Borrowing" information from other subjects' models improved accuracy. #SPRKrakow2025

📣 Hey #SPRKrakow2025! If you're into EMA and clinical practice, don’t miss our panel Enhancing Clinical Practice with EMA — happening today at 11:30 in Aula Duża A. With @christianwebb.bsky.social , @kopf-beck.bsky.social, @odedbein.bsky.social & Jessica Fritz

If you’re heading to @sprofficial.bsky.social meeting in Krakow, check out our panels on tech, personalization, & precision in psychotherapy! 📱 Enhancing Clinical Practice w/ EMA (Fri, 11:30am) 📊 Innovations in Personalization/Precision in Therapy (Sat, 2pm) 🧠 Neuroscience in Therapy (Sat, 3:15pm)

If you’re heading to @sprofficial.bsky.social meeting in Krakow, check out our panels on tech, personalization, & precision in psychotherapy! 📱 Enhancing Clinical Practice w/ EMA (Fri, 11:30am) 📊 Innovations in Personalization/Precision in Therapy (Sat, 2pm) 🧠 Neuroscience in Therapy (Sat, 3:15pm)

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...

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...

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 🥹

Great work led by @hadarfisher.bsky.social and Haya Fatimah on how emotion regulation dynamics during adolescence predict future depressive symptoms

Amazing new research study being launched at U of Melbourne on meditation practice across the globe! Please consider participating and sharing in your network: psychologicalsciences.unimelb.edu.au/CSC/research... @christianwebb.bsky.social @drericgarland.bsky.social @contemplativeneuro.bsky.social

I can’t explain how relieved I am to see this stipulation rescinded. Assuming they let me move the grant to Canada (fingers crossed), it means my lab, collaborators @christianwebb.bsky.social, Hani Zainal, and I are about to have the chance to do some really freaking cool mental health science.

📢New paper out today. We collected continuous passive smartphone and wrist-worn actigraphy data for 1 year in individuals w/ serious mental illness to try to predict their negative emotional states w/ Justin Baker, Boyu Ren, and team 1/n www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🚨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!

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)

7/7 Want to see it for yourself? Make sure to explore our interactive companion app to try the models, view feature importance, and ask our GPT-powered chatbot about the study: 👉 emotracknlp.streamlit.app

3/7 We analyzed 7,680 EMA text responses from 97 teens alongside self-reported neg emotions. We used 3 NLP approaches: 🟢 Dictionary-based (LIWC+VADER) 🟠 Topic modeling (LDA) 🟡 GPT-4–generated emotion scores We tested how well they predicted momentary emotion fluctuations.

2/7 Huge thanks to my amazing co-authors! 🙌 @christianwebb.bsky.social @nigeljaffe.bsky.social @kristinaPidvirny @AnnaTierney and @diegopizzagalli.bsky.social Make sure to check-out the companion web app: 👉 emotracknlp.streamlit.app

Excited and grateful to have received an R01 to expand our lab's work using passively collected data from smartphones and wearables to detect negative emotional states and predict depression risk in youth (working w/ Justin Baker, Habib Rahimi, and Boyu Ren)

If you're attending the ADAA conference in Vegas this week and you're interested in smartphone-delivered mindfulness interventions for youth with depression and anxiety come check out our Saturday symposium!

Please share: FT RA opening in my lab w/ June/July start. Join a team studying cognitive risk for internalizing psychopathology during the transition to college. Good preparation for PhD (current RA is starting her PhD this fall, with me!) #PsychSciSky brandeis.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/Jobs/job/Bra...

Can we skip classifying thoughts into “types”? What if we match on dimensions instead? Hani Zainal, Christian Webb, and I investigate at Behaviour Research and Therapy: Direct Mapping of Intervention to Thought Features: A Bayesian Proof-of-Concept Study https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2025.104717

Seattle! #standupforscience at the Seattle Center, next Friday at noon.

The Precision Psychopathology + Dynamic Immunopsychiatry Lab at UPenn will be hiring 1-2 post-bacc RAs and potentially a postdoc this year Immune/phlebotomy/blood preprocessing exp will be a plus. Formal posting will follow in a few weeks Excited to recruit the founding members of this team :)