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Reddit is widely used in research on youth and social media, yet there has been limited systematic examination of the diversity of content produced by young users or how their participation changes over time. We present a descriptive quantitative analysis of 443,856 Reddit posts between 2010 and 2023 by authors who self-disclosed their age as 11-24. Using topic modeling, longitudinal statistical analyses, and psycholinguistic measures, we identify nuances in the topics discussed by youth and examine how posting patterns vary across age groups over time. Our results document both stable themes and extreme shifts in youth discourse, offering a comprehensive benchmark for longitudinal characterization of youth participation on Reddit. We further discuss how our findings signal early social media adoption by youth for self-disclosure and the extent to which changes in youth discourse may mirror broader offline events and evolving youth concerns.
Introduction: Substance use disorders (SUDs) have emerged as a pressing public health concern in the United States, with adolescent substance use often leading to SUDs in adulthood. Effective strategies are needed to stem this progression. To help fulfill this need, we developed a novel absolute risk prediction model for cannabis use disorder (CUD) for adolescents or young adults who use cannabis. Methods: We trained a Bayesian machine learning model that provides a personalized CUD absolute risk for adolescents or young adults who use cannabis with data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Model performance was assessed using 5-fold cross-validation (CV) with area under the curve (AUC) and ratio of the expected to observed number of cases (E/O). Independent validation of the final model was conducted using two datasets. Results: The proposed model has five risk factors: biological sex, delinquency, and scores on personality traits of conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness. For predicting CUD risk within five years of first cannabis use, AUC values for the training dataset and two validation datasets were 0.68, 0.64, and 0.75, respectively, and
The primary goal of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) is to alleviate short-term poverty while preventing the intergenerational transmission of deprivation by promoting the accumulation of human capital among children. Although a substantial body of research has evaluated the short-run impacts of CCTs, studies on their long-term effects are relatively scarce, and evidence regarding their influence on resilience to future economic shocks is limited. As human capital accumulation is expected to enhance individuals' ability to cope with risk and uncertainty during turbulent periods, we investigate whether receiving a conditional cash transfer -- specifically, the Human Development Grant (HDG) in Ecuador -- during childhood improves the capacity to respond to unforeseen exogenous economic shocks in adulthood, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a regression discontinuity design (RDD) and leveraging merged administrative data, we do not find an overall effect of the HDG on the target population. Nevertheless, we present evidence that individuals who were eligible for the programme and lived in rural areas (where previous works have found the largest effects in terms of on short-term im
Extracranial tissues visible on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) may hold significant value for characterizing health conditions and clinical decision-making, yet they are rarely quantified. Current tools have not been widely validated, particularly in settings of developing brains or underlying pathology. We present TissUnet, a deep learning model that segments skull bone, subcutaneous fat, and muscle from routine three-dimensional T1-weighted MRI, with or without contrast enhancement. The model was trained on 155 paired MRI-computed tomography (CT) scans and validated across nine datasets covering a wide age range and including individuals with brain tumors. In comparison to AI-CT-derived labels from 37 MRI-CT pairs, TissUnet achieved a median Dice coefficient of 0.79 [IQR: 0.77-0.81] in a healthy adult cohort. In a second validation using expert manual annotations, median Dice was 0.83 [IQR: 0.83-0.84] in healthy individuals and 0.81 [IQR: 0.78-0.83] in tumor cases, outperforming previous state-of-the-art method. Acceptability testing resulted in an 89% acceptance rate after adjudication by a tie-breaker(N=108 MRIs), and TissUnet demonstrated excellent performance in the b
We study the impact of teenage sports participation on early-adulthood health using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. We focus on two primary outcomes measured at ages 23--28 -- self-rated health and total score on the PHQ9 Patient Depression Questionnaire -- and control for several potential confounders related to demographics and family socioeconomic status. To probe the possibility that certain types of sports participation may have larger effects on health than others, we conduct a matched observational study at each level within a hierarchy of exposures. Our hierarchy ranges from broadly defined exposures (e.g., participation in any organized after-school activity) to narrow (e.g., participation in collision sports). We deployed an ordered testing approach that exploits the hierarchical relationships between our exposure definitions to perform our analyses while maintaining a fixed family-wise error rate. Compared to teenagers who did not participate in any after-school activities, those who participated in sports had statistically significantly better self-rated and mental health outcomes in early adulthood.
Embedded information displays (EIDs) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous on home appliances and devices such as microwaves, coffee machines, fridges, or digital thermostats. These displays are often multi-purpose, functioning as interfaces for selecting device settings, communicating operating status using simple visualizations, and displaying notifications. However, their usability for people in the late adulthood (PLA) development stage is not well-understood. We report on two focus groups with PLA (n = 11, ages 76-94) from a local retirement community. Participants were shown images of everyday home electronics and appliances, answering questions about their experiences using the EIDs. Using open coding, we qualitatively analyzed their comments to distill key themes regarding how EIDs can negatively affect PLA's ability to take in information (e.g., poor labels) and interact with these devices (e.g., unintuitive steps) alongside strategies employed to work around these issues. We argue that understanding the equitable design and communication of devices' functions, operating status, and messages is important for future information display designers. We hope this work stimulates
Little research has investigated the design of conversational styles of voice assistants (VA) for adults in their later adulthood with varying personalities. In this Wizard of Oz experiment, 34 middle-aged (50 to 64 years old) and 24 older adults (65 to 80 years old) participated in a user study at a simulated home, interacting with a VA using either formal or informal language. Older adults with higher agreeableness perceived VA as being more likeable than middle-aged adults. Middle-aged adults showed similar technology acceptance toward the informal and formal VA, and older adults preferred using informal VA, especially those with low agreeableness. Further, while both middle-aged and older adults frequently anthropomorphized VAs by using human metaphors for them, older adults compared formal VA with professionals (e.g., librarians, teachers) and informal VA with their close ones (e.g., spouses, relatives). Overall, the conversational style showed differential effects on the perceptions of middle-aged and older adults, suggesting personalized design implications.
Transition to Adulthood is an essential life stage for many families. The prior research has shown that young people with intellectual or development disabil-ities (IDD) have more challenges than their peers. This study is to explore how to use natural language processing (NLP) methods, especially unsupervised machine learning, to assist psychologists to analyze emotions and sentiments and to use topic modeling to identify common issues and challenges that young people with IDD and their families have. Additionally, the results were compared to those obtained from young people without IDD who were in tran-sition to adulthood. The findings showed that NLP methods can be very useful for psychologists to analyze emotions, conduct cross-case analysis, and sum-marize key topics from conversational data. Our Python code is available at https://github.com/mlaricheva/emotion_topic_modeling.
We will study the impact of adolescent sports participation on early-adulthood health using longitudinal data from the National Study of Youth and Religion. We focus on two primary outcomes measured at ages 23--28 -- self-rated health and total score on the PHQ9 Patient Depression Questionnaire -- and control for several potential confounders related to demographics and family socioeconomic status. Comparing outcomes between sports participants and matched non-sports participants with similar confounders is straightforward. Unfortunately, an analysis based on such a broad exposure cannot probe the possibility that participation in certain types of sports (e.g., collision sports like football or soccer) may have larger effects on health than others. In this study, we introduce a hierarchy of exposure definitions, ranging from broad (participation in any after-school organized activity) to narrow (e.g., participation in limited-contact sports). We will perform separate matched observational studies, one for each definition, to estimate the health effects of several levels of sports participation. In order to conduct these studies while maintaining a fixed family-wise error rate, we d
Achieving high performance for facial age estimation with subjects in the borderline between adulthood and non-adulthood has always been a challenge. Several studies have used different approaches from the age of a baby to an elder adult and different datasets have been employed to measure the mean absolute error (MAE) ranging between 1.47 to 8 years. The weakness of the algorithms specifically in the borderline has been a motivation for this paper. In our approach, we have developed an ensemble technique that improves the accuracy of underage estimation in conjunction with our deep learning model (DS13K) that has been fine-tuned on the Deep Expectation (DEX) model. We have achieved an accuracy of 68% for the age group 16 to 17 years old, which is 4 times better than the DEX accuracy for such age range. We also present an evaluation of existing cloud-based and offline facial age prediction services, such as Amazon Rekognition, Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, How-Old.net and DEX.
Economists have mainly focused on human capital accumulation rather than on the causes and consequences of human capital depreciation in late adulthood. To investigate how human capital depreciates over the life cycle, we examine how a newly introduced pension program, the National Rural Pension Scheme, affects cognitive performance in rural China. We find significant adverse effects of access to pension benefits on cognitive functioning among the elderly. We detect the most substantial impact of the program on delayed recall, a cognition measure linked to the onset of dementia. In terms of mechanisms, cognitive deterioration in late adulthood is mediated by a substantial reduction in social engagement, volunteering, and activities fostering mental acuity.
Hyperkinetic movement disorders (HMDs) such as dystonia, tremor, chorea, myoclonus, and tics are disabling motor manifestations across childhood and adulthood. Their fluctuating, intermittent, and frequently co-occurring expressions hinder clinical recognition and longitudinal monitoring, which remain largely subjective and vulnerable to inter-rater variability. Objective and scalable methods to distinguish overlapping HMD phenotypes from routine clinical videos are still lacking. Here, we developed a pose-based machine-learning framework that converts standard outpatient videos into anatomically meaningful keypoint time series and computes kinematic descriptors spanning statistical, temporal, spectral, and higher-order irregularity-complexity features.
We adapt structural complexity analysis to three-dimensional signals, with an emphasis on brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). This framework captures the multiscale organization of volumetric data by coarse-graining the signal at progressively larger spatial scales and quantifying the information lost between successive resolutions. While the traditional block-based approach can become unstable at coarse resolutions due to limited sampling, we introduce a sliding-window coarse-graining scheme that provides smoother estimates and improved robustness at large scales. Using this refined method, we analyze large structural MRI datasets spanning mid- to late adulthood and find that structural complexity decreases systematically with age, with the strongest effects emerging at coarser scales. These findings highlight structural complexity as a reliable signal processing tool for multiscale analysis of 3D imaging data, while also demonstrating its utility in predicting biological age from brain MRI.
The start of a human's life can be characterized by two lotteries: that of your genes (nature) and the family you were born into (nurture). These set in motion a trajectory, from birth onward, in health and human capital. Leveraging three longitudinal social-science data sets, we systematically analyze the relationship between an individual's genotype, the socioeconomic status (SES) of the families they grew up in, and their realized traits in adulthood. We proxy an individual's genetic predisposition by polygenic indexes (PGIs) and family SES by a latent factor of parental education and father's (former) occupational status. We then investigate how PGIs, parental SES, and their interaction contribute to later-life outcomes across a range of forty-five socioeconomic, anthropometric, health, behavioral, and personality traits. We find strong genetic and socioeconomic associations with these phenotypes, but no evidence of sizable gene-environment interactions.
Substance use disorders (SUDs) are a serious public health concern in the United States. Alcohol and cannabis are two of the most widely used substances. For adolescent/youth users of alcohol or cannabis, we propose a joint Bayesian learning model to predict their risks of developing alcohol use disorder (AUD) and cannabis use disorder (CUD) in adulthood based on their personal risk factors. The model is trained on nationally representative longitudinal data from Add Health (n = 12503). It consists of sub-models that predict the two SUDs for three groups of users-those who use alcohol only, cannabis only, and both substances - based on shared as well as unique risk factors. The model comprises of ten predictors. We externally validate the model on two independent datasets. The areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves for AUD and CUD, respectively, are: (a) 0.719 and 0.690 based on 5-fold cross-validation, (b) 0.748 and 0.710 based on validation dataset 1, and (c) 0.650 and 0.750 based on validation dataset 2. A simulation study shows that the proposed joint modeling approach generally performs better than separate univariate modeling of the corresponding dependent o
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) have been linked to a wide range of negative health outcomes in adulthood. However, few studies have investigated what specific combinations of ACEs most substantially impact mental health. In this article, we provide the protocol for our observational study of the effects of combinations of ACEs on adult depression. We use data from the 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) to assess these effects. We will evaluate the replicability of our findings by splitting the sample into two discrete subpopulations of individuals. We employ data turnover for this analysis, enabling a single team of statisticians and domain experts to collaboratively evaluate the strength of evidence, and also integrating both qualitative and quantitative insights from exploratory data analysis. We outline our analysis plan using this method and conclude with a brief discussion of several specifics for our study.
Human brain development is a complex and dynamic process that begins during the first weeks of pregnancy and lasts until early adulthood. This chapter focuses on the developmental window from prenatal period to infancy, probably the most dynamic period across the entire lifespan. The availability of non-invasive three-dimensional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) methodologies has changed the paradigm and allows investigations of the living human brain structure - e.g. micro- and macrostructural features of cortical and subcortical regions and their connections, including cortical sulcation/gyrification, area, and thickness, as well as white matter microstructure and connectivity - beginning in utero. Because of its relative safety, MRI is well-adapted to study individuals at multiple time points and to longitudinally follow the changes in brain structure and function that underlie the early stages of cognitive development.
The functional brain network emerges from the complex, coordinated activity of distinct yet connected regions, which underlie the diverse repertoire of human cognitive functions. Structural Balance Theory (SBT) has been successfully applied to model such nontrivial connections through the analysis of balance and unbalance triadic configurations. In this study, using SBT, we examine the network of imbalanced triads in the resting-state brain subnetworks, which undergo dynamic changes during development. We demonstrate that anticorrelation patterns evolve across the lifespan, reflecting a developmental trajectory from a locally modular organization in childhood to a flexible and reconfigurable architecture during adolescence and finally to a highly segregated and functionally specialized network system in adulthood. This developmental trajectory indicates that the spread of anticorrelations is not an inherent feature of brain organization. This mature organization facilitates a balance between self-referential, internally generated cognitive processes and externally oriented, goal-directed cognition, enabling efficient and adaptive cognitive control. This balance is underpinned by pr
Stem cells are characterized by their ability to self-renew, as well as to differentiate and give rise to new populations of cells. Stem cell divisions are crucial for generative processes that occur during early development, and later in adulthood to support tissue regenerative capabilities. This property of stemness, the ability of self-renewal or tissue-specific differentiation, is also observed in cancer cells facilitating the sustenance of tumor growth, and in bipotent megakaryocytic-erythroid progenitors (MEPs) to produce blood cells. We are interested in modeling the size of the stem cell population required to adequately generate tissues or colonies of cells. We develop a state model that characterizes stem cell divisions and the dynamic changes of the stem cell and differentiated cell populations. In our model, the probabilities of self-renewal and differentiation events that stem cells undergo can vary over time instead of remaining constant throughout the process. We provide an estimation method for the division probabilities and using a simulation study, we show that our method provides good estimates even with a small sample size.
Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants, who engaged with a modular robot co-design framework. Using components we provided as building blocks, participants combined, removed, and invented modules to envision how modular robots could accompany them from childhood through adulthood and into older adulthood. The participants' designs illustrate how modularity (a) enables personalization through open-ended configuration, (b) adaptability across shifting life-stage needs, and (c) sustainability through repair, reuse, and continuity. We therefore derive design principles that establish modularity as a foundation for lifespan-oriented human-robot interaction. This work reframes modular robotics as a flexible and expressive co-design approach, supporting robots that evolve with people, rather than static products optimized for single moments or contexts of use.