Getting to know PLOS Mental Health: Well-being and Emotion

It has been a while since we posted a ‘Getting to know PLOS Mental Health‘ blog but we are back. This time we speak to Professor Micah Allen, who co-leads our ‘Well-being and Emotion’ Section alongside Professor Sidarta Ribeiro. Micah, who is based in Denmark, shares his expertise, interests, and why he joined PLOS Mental Health as one of the launch Section Editors…

Please tell us a little about yourself

I am Professor of Computational Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Aarhus University, where I lead the Embodied Computation Group. I trained in cognitive neuroscience and computational psychiatry, and my work examines how the brain interprets signals from the body and how these processes shape perception, emotion, and mental health. Our recent work has examined both the limits of broad claims about interoception and the value of studying specific brain-body systems more carefully. We are particularly interested in developing open methods that make this work easier to reproduce, extend, and translate into mental health research.

What are your main areas of interest?

My main interests are interoception, metacognition, emotion, and computational models of brain-body interaction. I am particularly interested in how signals from the heart, lungs, stomach, and other bodily systems contribute to subjective experience, and why these processes sometimes become disrupted in mental health conditions. My group combines psychophysics, computational modelling, neuroimaging, physiological measurement, and emerging digital methods.

Why did you agree to join PLOS Mental Health as a Section Editor?

I value PLOS’s commitment to open science, methodological transparency, and evaluating research on the strength of the question and evidence rather than perceived novelty alone. Mental health research also needs stronger links between basic mechanisms, lived experience, and clinical relevance. Joining the journal was an opportunity to support work that takes these aims seriously.

What kind of submissions would you like to see in the Well-being and Emotion section, and what do you think are the most pressing questions in the field?

I would particularly like to see meaningful studies of remote sensing and wearables in mental health and well-being. There is considerable promise in these methods, but the field needs to move beyond hype and simple prediction towards careful assessment, validation, and mechanistic questions. I am also interested in emerging computational and natural language processing methods for studying lived experience and patient narratives. These approaches could help us capture aspects of mental health that are difficult to reduce to conventional symptom scales, provided they remain closely grounded in the experiences they are intended to represent.

Finally, I would like to see more work on the somatic and interoceptive basis of well-being. We still understand relatively little about how signals from different bodily systems contribute to emotion, self-experience, and mental health, or how these relationships vary across people and contexts. Across these areas, I am most interested in studies that combine methodological innovation with careful measurement and clear theoretical questions.

Take a look at some of our ‘Well-being and Emotion’ article highlights, which include some of the topics that Micah mentions above:

• Cognitive arousal-based measures quantify insights from self-ratings in response to sensory stimuli

• Social media impact and smartwatch monitoring: Prevalence and early markers of PTSD and anxiety following mass traumatic events

• Heart rate variability versus visual analog scale for objective and subjective mental fatigue detection: A randomized controlled trial