While mental health apps can help to promote adolescents’ mental health, prevent mental health problems, and reduce symptoms, maintaining sufficient user engagement with these apps remains challenging. This is often caused by a mismatch between the needs and preferences of adolescents and what the apps offer. Therefore, we need a better understanding of (i) adolescents’ needs and preferences and (ii) potential differences based on user characteristics. To this end, we qualitatively and quantitatively analyzed a dataset describing the user experience of 1312 Dutch adolescents (12–25 years) from the general population after they interacted for several weeks with a gamified mHealth app (the Grow It! app) that aims to promote momentary emotional awareness, reflection, and adaptive coping. A total of 4833 free-text survey responses spanning five user experience survey questions were analyzed using an inductive and iterative coding process, while accounting for intercoder reliability. We used (i) a thematic analysis to identify adolescents’ needs and preferences related to the app, and (ii) an exploratory quantitative analysis of the subthemes to investigate potential differences in which needs and preferences were mentioned by adolescents based on demographics. Through our thematic analysis, we identified three overarching themes related to the app’s design: usability , psychological impact , and meaningful interactive features . Furthermore, we identified two overarching themes that related to the adolescents’ motivation to use the app: intrinsic (de)motivators , and social–environmental factors impacting usage . Each of these themes consisted of four subthemes. Our exploratory statistical analysis shed light on several differences in how frequently these subthemes were mentioned based on age, sex, and educational level. By synthesizing our insights, we identify five design implications that can help tailor future mHealth apps to adolescents’ needs and preferences. These include concrete suggestions to personalize self-monitoring, include actionable insights, align content with personal needs, implement meaningful interactive features (e.g., competitions, gamification, and social communication), and make apps appealing to the entire target group.

Introduction: Individual differences in social learning impact many important decisions, from voting behavior to polarization. Prior research has found that there are consistent and stable individual differences in social information use. However, the underlying mechanisms of these individual differences are still poorly understood. Methods: We used two complementary exploratory machine learning approaches to identify brain volumes related to individual differences in social information use. Results and discussion: Using lasso regression and random forest regression we were able to capture linear and non-linear brain-behavior relationships. Consistent with previous studies, our results suggest there is a robust positive relationship between the volume of the left pars triangularis and social information use. Moreover, our results largely overlap with common social brain network regions, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, superior temporal sulcus, temporal parietal junction, and anterior cingulate cortex. Besides, our analyses also revealed several novel regions related to individual differences in social information use, such as the postcentral gyrus, the left caudal middle frontal gyrus, the left pallidum, and the entorhinal cortex. Together, these results provide novel insights into the neural mechanisms that underly individual differences in social learning and provide important new leads for future research.

Human intelligence continues to be essential in building ground-truth data, training sets, and for evaluating a plethora of systems. The democratized and distributed nature of online crowd work - an attractive and accessible feature that has led to the proliferation of the paradigm - has also meant that crowd workers may not always feel connected to their remote peers. Despite the prevalence of collaborative crowdsourcing practices, workers on many microtask crowdsourcing platforms work on tasks individually and are seldom directly exposed to other crowd workers. In this context, improving worker engagement on microtask crowdsourcing platforms is an unsolved challenge. At the same time, fostering a sense of community among workers can improve the sustainability and working conditions in crowd work. This work aims to increase worker engagement in conversational microtask crowdsourcing by leveraging evolving avatars that workers can customize as they progress through monotonous task batches. We also aim to improve group identifcation in individual tasks by creating a community space where workers can share their avatars and feelings on task completion. To this end, we carried out a preregistered between-subjects controlled study (N = 680) spanning fve experimental conditions and two task types. We found that evolving and customizable worker avatars can increase worker retention. The prospect of sharing worker avatars and task-related feelings in a community space did not consistently afect group identifcation. Our exploratory analysis indicated that workers who identify themselves as crowd workers experienced greater intrinsic motivation, subjective engagement, and perceived workload. Furthermore, we discuss how task diferences shape the relative efectiveness of our interventions. Our fndings have important theoretical and practical implications for designing conversational crowdsourcing tasks and in shaping new directions for research to improve crowd worker experiences.