Candice Odgers
Professor Psychological Science | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist who studies adolescents’ mental health and development.
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Biography
Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist who studies adolescents’ mental health and development. Her research team tracks adolescents’ daily mental health and device use via smartphones and has built new virtual tools for capturing the neighborhoods where children live and attend school.
Areas of Expertise (7)
Early Adversity
Quantitative Psychology
Social Inequality
Technology and Young People
Digital Inequality
Developmental Psychology
Adolescent Mental Health
Accomplishments (5)
Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Early Career Award (professional)
2015 American Psychological Association
Janet Taylor Spence Award (professional)
2012 Association for Psychological Science
Excellence in Mentorship Award (professional)
2012 Institute for Clinical and Translational Science
Early Career Contributions Award (professional)
2011 Society for Research on Child Development
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research (professional)
2010 University of California, Irvine
Education (3)
University of Virginia: PhD, Psychology 2005
Simon Fraser University: MA 2001
Simon Fraser University: BA 1999
Affiliations (2)
- Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology : Editorial Board
- Perspectives on Psychological Science : Editorial Board
Links (8)
Media Appearances (8)
OC500: Candid Odgers
Orange County Business Journal online
2024-11-17
Co-leads a UCI program called Connecting the EdTech Research EcoSystem (CERES) along with Gillian Hayes, vice provost for graduate education and dean of the graduate division. In 2021, they won a five-year, $11M donation from the Jacobs Foundation, a Swiss-based nonprofit that invests in children to help them reach their potential. “In terms of AI, there is a lot of great work that’s happening, but it’s being done on fairly small populations. No one’s yet created a true national benchmark.”
Americans under 30 are miserable compared to Boomers: ‘The future is looking pretty bleak’
CNBC online
2024-08-28
Jonathan Haidt and other researchers argue that technology and social media have led to an epidemic of isolation and loneliness. … Candice L. Odgers, a professor in the psychological science department at the University of California, Irvine, says Haidt’s findings are unsupported by research. “Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt,” Odgers wrote in the academic journal Nature. “Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations.”
Seven Insights From Teens About Social Media and Mental Health
Greater Good Magazine online
2024-08-19
Candice Odgers, associate dean and professor of psychology and informatics at University of California, Irvine, points out that the science to date “does not support the widespread panic around social media and mental health.” She notes that, in addition to findings from multiple large-scale meta-analyses and reviews, an expert committee, convened by the National Academies of Sciences, reported in 2023 that the available research on social media and kids’ health and well-being shows only “small effects and weak associations.”
Generation Text: NBC survey of principals reveals deep concern about impact of phones in schools
NBC New York online
2024-07-29
Professor Candice Odgers, a quantitative and developmental psychologist at UC Irvine, fears parents and policymakers have been too hasty in framing phones as the primary cause of increased reports of anxiety and depression among young people. … “The message that’s being sent to the public is that there is a consensus that social media, screen time, smartphones, are uniformly damaging and having a negative impact on our kids. … But that is not what the science says.”
A New Development in the Debate About Instagram and Teens
MSN (The Atlantic) online
2024-07-17
Candice Odgers, a psychologist at UC Irvine who studies the effects of technology on adolescent mental health and has written on the subject for The Atlantic, said the pilot program is a decent, if limited, first step. “Scientifically, I think this is a critical step in the right direction as it offers a potentially open and transparent way of testing how social media may be impacting adolescents’ well-being and lives,” she told me. “It can help to ensure that science is conducted in the light of day, by having researchers preregister their findings and openly share their code, data, and results for others to replicate.” Researchers have long called for more data sharing from Meta, Odgers noted. “This announcement represents one step forward, although they can, and should, certainly do more.”
Potato chips or heroin? The debate on social media and mental health
Freethink online
2024-07-17
In a 2020 review of the research literature, Candice Odgers and Michaeline Jensen, psychologists at the UC Irvine and UNC Greensboro, respectively, found that the research was ultimately mixed but that the most rigorous, pre-registered studies report “small associations between the amount of daily digital technology usage and adolescents’ well-being that do not offer a way of distinguishing cause from effect.”
Did social media really fuel the youth mental health crisis? ‘The Anxious Generation’ researcher calls the correlation ‘irrefutable’
Fortune online
2024-07-14
[Jonathan] Haidt’s claim—that Gen Z kids are different from their predecessors in terms of mental health because they’ve grown up on smartphones—as well as his suggestions for dialing it back, have prompted much pushback. … Candice Odgers of the University of California, Irvine, in her Nature journal critique of his book, said Haidt is adding to a “rising hysteria” around phones and that he is “telling stories that are unsupported by research.”
A Surgeon General Warning - Will a social media warning really help children’s mental health?
The New York Times online
2024-06-21
Jonathan Haidt …. wrote this book, “The Anxious Generation,” … that covers this similar idea, that social media can be really risky. … Candice Odgers, who’s a professor at UC Irvine, wrote in the journal “Nature,” quote, “Hundreds of researchers, myself included, have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small, and mixed associations. Most data are correlative.” So in other words, efforts to prove … [if] you look at Instagram too long, it’s going to make you depressed — she’s saying, we have not been able to find a very large effect for that.
Articles (8)
Annual Research Review: Adolescent mental health in the digital age: facts, fears, and future directions
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry2020 Adolescents are spending an increasing amount of their time online and connected to each other via digital technologies. Mobile device ownership and social media usage have reached unprecedented levels, and concerns have been raised that this constant connectivity is harming adolescents’ mental health.
Young Adolescents' Digital Technology Use, Perceived Impairments, and Well-Being in a Representative Sample
The Journal of Pediatrics2020 To examine the cross-sectional associations between young adolescents' access, use, and perceived impairments related to digital technologies and their academic, psychological, and physical well-being.
Adolescents’ perceptions of family social status correlate with health and life chances: A twin difference longitudinal cohort study
PNAS2020 Despite growing up in the same family, siblings do not always see their family’s social standing identically. Eighteen-year-old twins who rated their family as having higher social standing, compared with their cotwin’s rating, had fewer difficulties negotiating the transition to adulthood: they were less likely to be convicted of a crime, not in education, employment, or training, and had fewer mental health problems.
Biological embedding of experience: A primer on epigenetics
PNAS2019 Biological embedding occurs when life experience alters biological processes to affect later life health and well-being. Although extensive correlative data exist supporting the notion that epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation underlie biological embedding, causal data are lacking. We describe specific epigenetic mechanisms and their potential roles in the biological embedding of experience.
Smartphones are bad for some teens, not all
Nature2018 Last year, I received a phone call from an angry father. He had just read in the newspaper about my research suggesting that some adolescents might benefit from time spent online. Once, he raged, his children had been fully engaged with family and church and had talked non-stop at meal times. Now, as adolescents who were constantly connected to their phones, they had disappeared into their online lives.
Persistence and Fadeout in the Impacts of Child and Adolescent Interventions
Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness2015 Many interventions targeting cognitive skills or socioemotional skills and behaviors demonstrate initially promising but then quickly disappearing impacts. Our article seeks to identify the key features of interventions, as well as the characteristics and environments of the children and adolescents who participate in them, that can be expected to sustain persistently beneficial program impacts.
Seven Fears and the Science of How Mobile Technologies May Be Influencing Adolescents in the Digital Age
Perspectives on Psychological Science2015 Close to 90% of U.S. adolescents now own or have access to a mobile phone, and they are using them frequently. Adolescents send and receive an average of over 60 text messages per day from their devices, and over 90% of adolescents now access the Internet from a mobile device at least occasionally. Many adults are asking how this constant connectivity is influencing adolescents’ development.
Systematic social observation of children’s neighborhoods using Google Street View: a reliable and cost‐effective method
The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry2012 Children growing up in poor versus affluent neighborhoods are more likely to spend time in prison, develop health problems and die at an early age. The question of how neighborhood conditions influence our behavior and health has attracted the attention of public health officials and scholars for generations. Online tools are now providing new opportunities to measure neighborhood features and may provide a cost effective way to advance our understanding of neighborhood effects on child health.
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