Social factors in the mental health of young adults: Bridging psychological and network analysis

项目摘要 该项目的目的是研究青年人长期心理健康的社会因素。 抑郁、焦虑和孤独感在大学生中急剧上升， 几十年来，造成了巨大的公共卫生负担。心理健康问题有可能在治疗期间加剧， 在COVID-19大流行之后，审查和扩大人们的复原力来源变得尤为紧迫 年轻人几十年的证据表明，社会联系，在主观形式， 归属感、客观的社会关系和支持性的人际交往，在几个关键方面促进了心理健康。 的方式我们建议，在大学早期，学生的连通性，以及通过 社会互动，可以在鼓励长期心理健康方面发挥关键作用。虽然基础，过去 这项工作在测试这些预测的能力方面是有限的，因为它通常检查（i）二元关系，而不是 （二）少数社会因素的影响，独立地，（三）短时间 跨度。这些限制与本科环境尤其相关，因为学生的社交生活集中在 个人所依赖的社会支持的广泛社区。该项目将合并社交工具 心理学，网络分析和神经科学提供了丰富的，精确的，纵向的帐户， 社会联系如何随着时间的推移支持年轻人的心理健康。我们的团队绘制了 社交网络形成了一个大的（n > 850）队列的新生，并结合这一点与 学生互动的生态瞬时评估和心理健康指数。我们发现， 证据表明：（i）“社会小气候”，如学生邻居的同情心，对个人影响很大 （ii）学生在有压力时会在社交网络中寻找支持他们的同伴，（iii）同伴互动 随着时间的推移减轻压力，（iv）孤独的学生低估了密切的社会关系， 资源在这里，我们将以几种方式扩展这项工作。首先，我们将纵向 方法：测量学生在大学生涯中的连通性和幸福感。我们将联合收割机 这些数据与尖端的预测模型，以量化如何在大学早期形成的社会关系， 以及学生随后的“心理健康轨迹”。第二，我们将招募 一个纵向的复制队列，以建立我们的效果的鲁棒性。第三，我们将在以往的基础上， 我们团队的神经成像工作，以探测社会联系的神经“签名”，并检查他们的神经系统。 与其他连接措施的关系，以及随着时间的推移与幸福的关系。在基础科学的层面上， 该项目将代表一种新颖的，自然主义的方法来研究心理健康的社会因素，并产生 一个大规模的，多方面的数据集，这将是公开提供，以促进合作， 社会联系的累积研究。在翻译层面，由此产生的数据可以为政策铺平道路 目的是在广大人群中培养更强的社会联系和心理健康。

PROJECT SUMMARY The purpose of this project is to examine social factors in the long-term mental health of young adults. Depression, anxiety, and loneliness have steeply risen among college and university students in the last decades, creating an enormous public health burden. Mental health difficulties promise to intensify during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, making it especially urgent to examine and amplify sources of resilience among young adults. Decades of evidence demonstrate that social connectedness, in the form of subjective belonging, objective social ties, and supportive interpersonal interactions, bolster mental health in several key ways. We propose that connectedness early in college, and students’ ability to regulate their emotions through social interactions, could play a pivotal role in encouraging long-term mental health. Though foundational, past work is limited in its ability to test these predictions because it typically examines (i) dyadic relationships rather than broader networks, (ii) the effect of small numbers of social factors, independently, and (iii) short time spans. These limitations are especially relevant to undergraduate settings, as student social life is centered in broad communities on which individuals depend for social support. This project will merge tools from social psychology, network analysis, and neuroscience to provide a rich, precise, and longitudinal account of how social connectedness supports young adult mental health over time. Our team has mapped the social networks formed by a large (n > 850) cohort of incoming university students, and combined this with ecological momentary assessment of students’ interactions and indices of mental health. We have found novel evidence that (i) “social microclimates,” such as the empathy of a student’s neighbors, affect individual well being, (ii) students search their social networks for supportive peers when under stress, (iii) peer interactions mitigate stress over time, and (iv) lonely students under-perceive close social ties, and under-utilize social resources. Here, we will expand this work in several ways. First, we will incorporate a longitudinal approach: measuring students’ connectedness and well being over their college career. We will combine these data with cutting-edge predictive modeling to quantify how social ties formed early in college relate to well being in later years, as well as students’ subsequent “mental health trajectories.” Second, we will recruit a longitudinal replication cohort to establish the robustness of our effects. Third, we will build on previous neuroimaging work of our team to probe neural “signatures” of social connectedness and examine their relationship to other measures of connection, and to well being, over time. At the level of basic science, this project will represent a novel, naturalistic approach to the study of social factors in mental health, and produce a large-scale, multifaceted dataset, which will be made publicly available to facilitate the collaborative and cumulative study of social connection. At a translational level, the resulting data can pave the way for policies aimed at fostering stronger social ties—and mental health—among a broad swath of the population.