Candice Odgers
Professor Psychological Science UC Irvine
- Irvine CA
Candice Odgers is a developmental psychologist who studies adolescents’ mental health and development.
Media
Social
Biography
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Distinguished Assistant Professor Award for Research
2010
University of California, Irvine
Early Career Contributions Award
2011
Society for Research on Child Development
Excellence in Mentorship Award
2012
Institute for Clinical and Translational Science
Janet Taylor Spence Award
2012
Association for Psychological Science
Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Early Career Award
2015
American Psychological Association
Education
University of Virginia
PhD
Psychology
2005
Simon Fraser University
MA
2001
Simon Fraser University
BA
1999
Affiliations
- Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology : Editorial Board
- Perspectives on Psychological Science : Editorial Board
Links
Media Appearances
The social media ban sceptic: are we getting it wrong on kids, tech and mental health?
The Guardian online
2026-07-16
“It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that bans are likely to make things worse, not better,” Odgers says via a video call from her home in Los Angeles, where she teaches at the University of California, Irvine. Odgers’ analysis of the evidence makes her doubtful whether children’s brains have been rewired by mobile phones and certain that there is limited data to support the idea that social media is driving a dip in adolescent mental health.
What If It’s Not the Phone?
The Atlantic online
2026-07-09
Candice Odgers says she appreciates the fact that the book Restoring Childhood is “broadening the conversation” about children’s mental health to include “a major stressor as reported by young people, that we actually see in the data.” But the UC Irvine psychology professor expressed frustration at the logic used by author Peter Gray and The Anxious Generation author Jonathan Haidt alike. She noted their shared willingness to apply one explanation (video games, unleaded gas) to the mental-health improvements of the 1990s and 2000s, and then a completely different one (Common Core, social media) to a later section of the same trend line. Both Gray and Haidt also tended to downplay other obvious factors, such as the severe adult-mental-health crisis that unfolded during the same years. “Caregiver mental health is by far the strongest predictor of childhood mental health,” Odgers said.
Lessons From TED 2026
Forbes online
2026-04-21
Ten Great Talks. … Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke about how screen time and social media have contributed to rising levels of depression and anxiety among teens. Later, psychologist Candice Odgers [UC Irvine Chancellor’s Professor] offered a competing view. While she’s no fan of tech companies, Odgers argued that the data simply doesn’t support Haidt’s conclusions. Screen time isn’t as bad as you think. I lack the expertise to know who’s right, but it’s worth watching their recent debate at the University of Virginia. You can decide for yourself.
Is All Screen Time Harmful?
Medpage Today online
2025-11-30
Psychologist Candice Odgers, PhD, a professor at University of California, Irvine, has shown through large-scale studies that the link between screen time and poor mental health is often small, inconsistent, and easily overshadowed by other factors such as family stress or offline relationships. Screen time alone doesn't explain what's happening to mental health. The problem is not necessarily how much time a person spends on devices -- but what they do while they're there.
AI Is Still an Unknown Country — and Teens Are Its Pioneers
EdSurge online
2025-06-13
When artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT were first introduced for public use in 2022, Gillian Hayes, vice provost for academic personnel at the University of California, Irvine, remembers how people were setting up rules around AI without a good understanding of what it truly was or how it would be used. … Seeing a need for more and clearer data, Hayes and her colleague Candice L. Odgers, a professor of psychological science and informatics at UC Irvine, launched a national survey to investigate the use of AI among teens, parents and educators. Their goal was to collect a broad set of data that could be used to continuously investigate how uses and attitudes toward AI shift over time.
Articles
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.
