Amanda C. Collins, PhD
Member of the Faculty, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School
Dr. Amanda Collins is a Member of the Faculty at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, with a primary appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Depression Clinical and Research Program. She completed her T32 Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Dartmouth College and the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health with Dr. Nick Jacobson, and she received her PhD in clinical psychology from Mississippi State University under the mentorship of E. Samuel Winer. Her research focuses on reward dysfunction as a transdiagnostic mechanism underlying the etiology and maintenance of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, and substance use disorders. The two areas of her research focus on: (1) the application of advanced statistical methods to predict changes in psychopathology and (2) the development and testing of both in-person and digital interventions. She is particularly interested in bridging these two areas of research by using advanced methods to understand what interventions work best and for whom, with the overall goal of developing more personalized interventions to treat reward dysfunction transdiagnostically. Dr. Collins utilizes a multimodal approach, including self-reports, experimental paradigms, ecological momentary assessments, and passive sensing, to investigate the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of psychopathology. She also has extensive experience with longitudinal data analysis, including multilevel and time-varying vector autoregressive modeling, mixed-effects modeling, and machine learning to investigate how reward dysfunction changes over time and influences the course, severity, and treatment of psychopathology. Her work has been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse to develop and evaluate digital interventions for co-occurring disorders.
Selected Publications
- Calafiore C, Collins AC, Bartoszek G, Winer ES. Assessing relinquishment of positivity as a central symptom bridging anxiety and depression. J Affect Disord. 2024 Dec 15;367:38-48. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2024.08.031. PMID: 39147161; PMCID: PMC11496000.
- Collins AC, Price GD, Dainer-Best J, Haddox D, Beevers CG, Jacobson NC. Changes to positive self-schemas after a positive imagery training are predicted by participant characteristics in a sample with elevated depressive symptoms. Cognitive Therapy and Research. 2024 Nov 9. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10608-024-10544-3
- Collins AC, Bhattacharya S, Oh JY, Salzhauer A, Taylor CT, Wolitzky-Taylor K, Aupperle RL, Budney AJ, Jacobson NC. Inclusion of individuals with lived experiences in the development of a digital intervention for co-occurring depression and cannabis use: Mixed methods investigation. JMIR Form Res. 2024 Oct 7;8:e54751. doi: 10.2196/54751. PMID: 39374076.
- Collins AC, Lekkas D, Struble CA, Trudeau BM, Jewett AD, Griffin TZ, Nemesure MD, Price GD, Heinz MV, Nepal S, Pillai A, Mackin DM, Campbell AT, Budney AJ, Jacobson NC. From mood to use: Using ecological momentary assessments to examine how anhedonia and depressed mood impact cannabis use in a depressed sample. Psychiatry Res. 2024 Sep;339:116110. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2024.116110. PMID: 39079375.
- Nemesure MD, Collins AC, Price GD, Griffin TZ, Pillai A, Nepal S, Heinz MV, Lekkas D, Campbell AT, Jacobson NC. Depressive symptoms as a heterogeneous and constantly evolving dynamical system: Idiographic depressive symptom networks of rapid symptom changes among persons with major depressive disorder. J Psychopathol Clin Sci. 2024 Feb;133(2):155-166. doi: 10.1037/abn0000884. PMID: 38271054.
- Collins AC, Winer ES. Self-referential processing and depression: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychological Science. 2023 Sept 11;12(4):721-750.