Nicholas B Allen

University of Oregon | UO · Department of Psychology

Researchers are interested in measuring both objective and subjective assessments of sleep, and associated phenomena such as sleepiness, quality and restoration. Predicting perceived sleep quality accurately from objective measurements remains an unsolved and interesting problem. Previous studies using polysomnograms and actigraphy have shown poor...

Electrodermal activity (EDA) is a measure of sympathetic arousal that has been linked to depression in laboratory experiments. However, the inability to measure EDA passively over time and in the real-world has limited conclusions that can be drawn about EDA as an indicator of mental health status outside of controlled settings. Recent smartwatches...

BACKGROUND Youth suicide rates are climbing, underscoring the need to improve clinical care. Personal smartphones can provide an understanding of proximal risk factors associated with suicide and facilitate consistent contact between patients and practitioners to improve treatment engagement and effectiveness. The Vira digital behavior change platf...

Intensive longitudinal research—including experience sampling and smartphone sensor monitoring—has potential for identifying proximal risk factors for psychopathology, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). Yet, missing data can complicate analysis and interpretation. This study aimed to address whether clinical and study design factors a...

Magnetic resonance imaging has provided pathophysiological insights into adolescent depression but is a relatively inaccessible technology. Generating scalable indicators of depression that are informed by neuroscience is therefore critical for providing solutions that allow us to detect and treat this devastating disorder. In this preregistered st...

Sexual and gender minority (SGM) adolescents are at elevated risk for depression. This risk is especially pronounced among adolescents whose home environment is unsupportive or nonaffirming, as these adolescents may face familial rejection due to their identity. Therefore, it is critical to better understand the mechanisms underlying this risk by p...

Brain structural alterations are consistently reported in depressive disorders, yet it remains unclear whether these alterations reflect a pre-existing vulnerability or are the result of psychopathology. We aimed to investigate prospective adolescent neurodevelopmental risk markers for depressive disorder onset, using data from a fifteen-year longi...

Introduction The Digital Wellbeing Study is an IRB approved joint study between the University of Oregon and Google to investigate how smartphone usage interacts with objective and subjective parameters of well-being such as sleep, exercise and stress. The study recruited a demographically diverse population who each wore a smartwatch and installed...

Introduction Wearables offer scalable, passive and objective measures of sleep, but how well do they capture feelings of sleep disturbance and impairment? We studied a large, diverse group (n=2992 adults) using wearables and compared sleep metrics to self-reported sleep disturbance and impairment. Methods Participants in the Digital Wellbeing Stud...

Background: Adolescence and early adulthood are pivotal stages for the onset of mental health disorders and the development of health behaviors. Digital behavioral activation (BA) interventions, with or without coaching support, hold promise for addressing risk factors for both mental and physical health problems by offering scalable approaches to...

Intensive longitudinal research–including experience sampling and smartphone sensor monitoring–has potential for identifying proximal risk factors for psychopathology, including suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STB). Yet, missing data can complicate analysis and interpretation. This study aimed to address whether clinical and study design factors a...

Background Cross sectional studies have identified linguistic correlates of major depressive disorder (MDD) in smartphone communication. However, it is unclear whether monitoring these linguistic characteristics can detect when an individual is experiencing MDD, which would facilitate timely intervention. Methods Approximately 1.2 million messages...

Maternal depressive symptoms are associated with elevations in harsh parenting behavior, including criticism, negative affect, and hostile or coercive behavior, and these behaviors contribute to associations between maternal depressive symptomatology and child functioning. We used multilevel survival analysis to examine social–cognitive processes a...

Most mental disorders have a typical onset between 12 and 25 years of age, highlighting the importance of this period for the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of mental ill-health. This perspective addresses interactions between risk and protective factors and brain development as key pillars accounting for the emergence of psychopathology in...

BACKGROUND Adolescence and early adulthood are pivotal stages for the onset of mental health disorders and the development of health behaviors. Digital behavioral activation (BA) interventions, with or without coaching support, hold promise for addressing risk factors for both mental and physical health problems by offering scalable approaches to e...

Most adolescents with depression remain undiagnosed and untreated—missed opportunities that are costly from both personal and public health perspectives. A promising approach to detecting adolescent depression in real-time and at a large scale is through their social communication on the smartphone (e.g., text messages, social media posts). Past re...

Background Suicide is a major public health crisis among youth. Several prominent theories, including the Interpersonal Theory of Suicide (IPTS), aim to characterize the factors leading from suicide ideation to action. These theories are largely based on findings in adults and require testing and elaboration in adolescents. Methods Data were exami...

Emerging evidence suggests distinct neurobiological correlates of alcohol use disorder (AUD) between sexes, which however remain largely unexplored. This work from ENIGMA Addiction Working Group aimed to characterize the sex differences in gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) correlates of AUD using a whole-brain, voxel-based, multi-tissue mega-a...

Personalized prediction is a machine learning approach that predicts a person's future observations based on their past labeled observations and is typically used for sequential tasks, e.g., to predict daily mood ratings. When making personalized predictions, a model can combine two types of trends: (a) trends shared across people, i.e., person-gen...

BACKGROUND The impact of digital device use on health and well-being is a pressing question. However, the scientific literature on this topic, to date, is marred by small and unrepresentative samples, poor measurement of core constructs, and a limited ability to address the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that may underlie the relationships...

Background The impact of digital device use on health and well-being is a pressing question. However, the scientific literature on this topic, to date, is marred by small and unrepresentative samples, poor measurement of core constructs, and a limited ability to address the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that may underlie the relationships...

Parenting styles associated with maternal depression are a risk factor for adolescent psychopathology, and maternal attributional styles may be a key mechanism in this relationship. Mother-adolescent dyads (N = 180; 96 male; ages 10-15) completed in-person interactions and then the mothers participated in a video-mediated recall procedure to assess...

Objective: Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents. However, there are no clinical tools to detect proximal risk for suicide. Method: Participants included 13-18-year-old adolescents (N=103) reporting a current depressive, anxiety, and/or substance use disorder who owned a smartphone; 62% reported current suicidal ideation with 25%...

Pubertal processes are associated with structural brain development, but studies have produced inconsistent findings that may relate to different measurements of puberty. Measuring both hormones and physical characteristics is important for capturing variation in neurobiological development. The current study explored associations between cortical...

Adolescents’ increasing use of smartphone technology has led to unprecedented opportunities to identify early indicators of shifting mental health. This intensive longitudinal study examined the extent to which differences in mental health and daily mood are associated with digital social communication in adolescence. In a sample of 30 adolescents...

Earlier pubertal development appears to be one pathway through which childhood trauma contributes to psychopathology in adolescence. Puberty-related changes in neural networks involved in emotion processing, namely the amygdala-medial prefrontal (mPFC) circuit, may be a potential mechanism linking trauma and adolescent psychopathology. Our particip...

Early adolescents (ages 10-13 years) increasingly spend their time in digital spaces. We must ensure that the digital spaces that we create for early adolescents support their learning, discovery, exploration, and entertainment in positive ways that limit potential harm, just like the physical spaces where they spend their time. Research supports f...

The ILHBN is funded by the National Institutes of Health to collaboratively study the interactive dynamics of behavior, health, and the environment using Intensive Longitudinal Data (ILD) to (a) understand and intervene on behavior and health and (b) develop new analytic methods to innovate behavioral theories and interventions. The heterogenous st...

Pubertal processes are associated with structural brain development, but studies have produced inconsistent findings that may relate to different measurements of puberty. Measuring both hormones and physical characteristics is important for capturing variation in neurobiological development. The current study explored associations between cortical...

Background Morning–evening preference is defined as an individual's preference for a morning‐ or evening‐oriented rhythm. Across adolescence, a preference for eveningness becomes more predominant. Although eveningness is cross‐sectionally associated with internalizing and externalizing psychopathology, few studies have examined developmental change...

The negative impact of adverse experiences in childhood on neurodevelopment is well documented. Less attention however has been given to the impact of variations in “normative” parenting behaviors. The influence of these parenting behaviors is likely to be marked during periods of rapid brain reorganization, such as late childhood. The aim of the c...

An increased prevalence of duplicated Heschl’s gyrus (HG) has been repeatedly demonstrated in various stages of schizophrenia as a potential neurodevelopmental marker, but it remains unknown whether other neuropsychiatric disorders also exhibit this macroscopic brain feature. The present magnetic resonance imaging study aimed to examine the disease...

Background/aims: This study examined how mothers with and without depression differ in neural activation in response to adolescents' affective faces. Secondly, it examined the extent to which these neural activation patterns are related to observed positive and aggressive parenting behavior. Methods: Mothers with and without depression (based on...

UNSTRUCTURED This paper re-introduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), four years and 4,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants’ normal smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improve...

This paper reintroduces the Effortless Assessment Research System (EARS), 4 years and 10,000 participants after its initial launch. EARS is a mobile sensing tool that affords researchers the opportunity to collect naturalistic, behavioral data via participants' naturalistic smartphone use. The first section of the paper highlights improvements made...

Background A growing body of evidence suggests that parenting behaviors may affect child mental health via altering brain development. There is a scarcity of research, however, that has investigated associations between parenting behavior and brain structure using longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This study aimed to investigate associ...

Depression affects neural processing of emotional stimuli, and could, therefore, impact parent-child interactions. However, the neural processes with how mothers with depression process their adolescents’ affective interpersonal signals, and how this relates to mothers’ parenting behavior, are poorly understood. Mothers with and without depression...

Opioid use disorder (OUD) has been linked to exaggerated attentional, affective, and arousal responses to opioid-related stimuli, as well as altered responses to other affective (eg, naturally rewarding or aversive) stimuli, particularly blunted responses to pleasant/rewarding stimuli. Both exaggerated responses to drug-related stimuli and reduced...

Early pubertal timing has consistently been associated with internalizing psychopathology in adolescent girls. Here, we aimed to examine whether the association between timing and mental health outcomes varies by measurement of pubertal timing and internalizing psychopathology, differs between adrenarcheal and gonadarcheal processes, and is stronge...

Background and aims Graph theoretic analysis of structural covariance networks (SCN) provides an assessment of brain organization that has not yet been applied to alcohol dependence (AD). We estimated whether SCN differences are present in adults with AD and heavy drinking adolescents at age 19 and age 14, prior to substantial exposure to alcohol....

This paper studies the hypothesis that not all modalities are always needed to predict affective states. We explore this hypothesis in the context of recognizing three affective states that have shown a relation to a future onset of depression: positive, aggressive, and dysphoric. In particular, we investigate three important modalities for face-to...

Background Self-harm in very young people can be a clinically ominous event. While most studies to date have focused on self-harm during the teenage years, fewer studies have examined children aged 12 years or under. We aimed to estimate the incidence and correlates of recent self-harm in a population-based, non-treatment-seeking sample of primary...

Background Although stress is a risk factor for mental and physical health problems, it can be difficult to assess, especially on a continual, non-invasive basis. Mobile sensing data, which are continuously collected from naturalistic smartphone use, may estimate exposure to acute and chronic stressors that have health-damaging effects. This initia...

Background Understanding the neurobiological underpinnings of childhood maltreatment is vital given consistent links with poor mental health. Dimensional models of adversity purport that different types of adversity likely have distinct neurobiological consequences. Adolescence is a key developmental period, during which deviations from normative n...

Supporting healthy youth development depends on recognizing how anti-Black racism intersects with the core needs and opportunities of adolescence and working to mitigate and eliminate these effects. A new report from the National Scientific Council on Adolescence (NSCA), housed at the Center for the Developing Adolescent (CDA) at UCLA, summarizes r...

Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been linked to alterations in brain structure; however, positive environmental (e.g., positive parenting) and psychological factors (e.g., temperament) may buffer these effects. We aimed to investigate associations between neighborhood disadvantage and deviations from typical neurodevelopmental trajectorie...

Puberty triggers a period of structural “re-organization” in the brain, when rising hormone levels act via receptors to influence morphology. However, our understanding of these neuroendocrine processes in humans remains poor. As such, the current longitudinal study characterized development of the human subcortex during puberty, including changes...

Objective: Determine whether automated changes in electronic screen color temperature of personal electronic devices is associated with changes in objective and self-reported indices of sleep and mental health in young adults, as well as determine feasibility and acceptability of the experimental manipulation. Participants: A single-blind random...

Mental health conditions remain underdiagnosed even in countries with common access to advanced medical care. The ability to accurately and efficiently predict mood from easily collectible data has several important implications for the early detection, intervention, and treatment of mental health disorders. One promising data source to help monito...

Depression presents risks that are profound and intergenerational, yet research on the association of depression with the physiological processes that might be associated with impaired mental and physical health has only recently been contextualized within the family environment. Participants in this multi-method case–control study were 180 mother-...

Rationale Early-onset adolescent depression is related to poor prognosis and a range of psychiatric and medical comorbidities later in life, making the identification of a priori risk factors for depression highly important. Increasingly, dysregulated levels of immune and neuroendocrine markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and cortisol, have b...

Parenting behavior has a vital role in the development of the brain and cognitive abilities of offspring throughout childhood and adolescence. While positive and aggressive parenting behavior have been suggested to impact neurobiology in the form of abnormal brain activation in adolescents, little work has investigated the links between parenting b...

Males and females show different patterns of cannabis use and related psychosocial outcomes. However, the neuroanatomical substrates underlying such differences are poorly understood. The aim of this study was to map sex differences in the neurobiology (as indexed by brain volumes) of dependent and recreational cannabis use. We compared the volume...

Background: There is increasing evidence that patterns of pubertal maturation are associated with different patterns of health risk. This study aimed to explore the associations between anthropometric measures and salivary androgen concentrations in pre-adolescent children. Methods: We analysed a stratified random sample (N=1151) of pupils aged...

The increasing use of smartphone technology by adolescents has led to unprecedented opportunities to identify early indicators of shifting mental health. This intensive longitudinal study examined the extent to which differences in mental health and daily mood are associated with digital social communication in adolescence. In a sample of 29 adoles...

Background : Empathy is a multidimensional construct, which includes cognitive and affective components. Studies in adults have demonstrated that both cognitive and affective empathy are associated with anxious and depressive symptoms. The aim of this study was to examine these associations in childhood. Methods : Participants were 127 9- and 10-y...

Males and females with alcohol dependence have distinct mental health and cognitive problems. Animal models of addiction postulate that the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are partially distinct, but there is little evidence of sex differences in humans with alcohol dependence as most neuroimaging studies have been conducted in males. We exam...

Gender-related differences in the susceptibility, progression and clinical outcomes of alcohol dependence are well-known. However, the neurobiological substrates underlying such differences remain unclear. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate gender differences in the neuroanatomy (i.e. regional brain volumes) of alcohol dependence. We examin...

A substantial body of knowledge suggests that exposure to adverse family environments - including violence and neglect - influences many aspects of brain development. Relatively less attention has been directed toward the influence of "normative" differences in parenting behaviors. Given the rapid brain reorganization during late childhood, parenti...

Shame and guilt are moral emotions that play an important role in social functioning. There is limited knowledge about the neural underpinnings of these emotions, particularly in young people. In the current study, 36 healthy females (mean age 18.8 ± 1.9 years) underwent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, during which they reflected on their de...

Objective: Early pubertal timing has consistently been associated with internalizing psychopathology in adolescent girls. Here, we aimed to examine whether the association between timing and mental health outcomes varies by measurement of pubertal timing and internalizing psychopathology, differs between adrenarcheal and gonadarcheal processes, and...

Mental health conditions remain under-diagnosed even in countries with common access to advanced medical care. The ability to accurately and efficiently predict mood from easily collectible data has several important implications towards the early detection and intervention of mental health disorders. One promising data source to help monitor human...

The brain undergoes extensive structural changes during adolescence, concurrent to puberty-related physical and hormonal changes. While animal research suggests these biological processes are related to one another, our knowledge of brain development in humans is largely based on age-related processes. Thus, the current study characterized puberty-...

Introduction No prospective studies have examined the prevalence, antecedents or concurrent characteristics associated with self-harm in non-treatment-seeking primary school-aged children. Methods In this cohort study from Melbourne, Australia we assessed 1239 children annually from age 8–9 years (wave 1) to 11–12 years (wave 4) on a range of heal...

Background Use of social networking in later childhood and adolescence has risen quickly. The consequences of these changes for mental health are debated but require further empirical evaluation. Methods Using data from the Childhood to Adolescence Transition Study (n = 1,156), duration of social networking use was measured annually at four time p...