Optimizing a mobile just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) for weight loss in young adults: Rationale and design of the AGILE factorial randomized trial.

Background: Young adults (YAs) are underrepresented in behavioral health and weight loss interventions and express interest in flexible, highly tailored programs. Mobile interventions are a lower-burden, scalable approach to providing behavioral support. Just-in-time-adaptive interventions (JITAI) promise to deliver the "right" support at the "right" time using real-time data from smartphones and sensors.

Fluctuations in mHealth engagement following receipt of goal-discrepant feedback messages.

Objective: Digital behavior change interventions can successfully promote change in behavioral outcomes, but often suffer from steep decreases in engagement over time, which hampers their effectiveness. Providing feedback on goal performance is an established technique to promote goal attainment; however, theory indicates that sending goal-discrepant feedback messages could cause some users to respond more negatively than others. This analysis assessed whether goal-discrepant messaging was negatively associated with participant engagement, and if this relationship was exacerbated by baseline depressive symptoms within the context of a three-month weight loss pilot mHealth intervention.

Solitude and serotonin: juvenile isolation alters the covariation between social behavior and cFos expression by serotonergic neurons.

Variation in the mutual responsiveness of social partners to each other can be reflected in behavioral suites that covary with neural activity in ways that track the salience or valence of interactions. Juvenile social isolation alters social behavior and neural activity during social interaction, but whether and how it alters the covariation between behavior and neural activity has not been as well explored. To address this issue, four classes of experimental subjects: isolated males, socially housed males, isolated females, and socially housed females, were paired with an opposite-sex social partner that had been socially housed.

Motivated information avoidance in an mHealth weight loss intervention: Associations between unmet behavioral goals and likelihood of viewing program messages.

Background: Program engagement is positively associated with improved outcomes in mobile health (mHealth) interventions, but little is known about which factors may increase or decrease the likelihood of participants viewing program messages. This study examined the association between daily behavioral goal achievement and likelihood of reading daily messages, and if this relationship is moderated by baseline depressive symptoms in an mHealth weight loss intervention.

Methods: Data come from a 12-week microrandomized pilot mHealth weight management trial that tested the effects of daily messages on behavioral goals among 52 young adults (78.