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

项目总结 本项目的目的是研究社会因素对年轻人长期心理健康的影响。 在过去的几年里，大学生的抑郁、焦虑和孤独感急剧上升 几十年，造成了巨大的公共卫生负担。心理健康困难有可能在和 在新冠肺炎大流行之后，特别迫切地需要研究和放大 年轻人。几十年的证据表明，社会联系，以主观的形式 归属感、客观的社会关系和支持性的人际互动在几个关键方面有助于心理健康 方式。我们认为，大学早期的连通性，以及学生通过 社会互动可以在鼓励长期心理健康方面发挥关键作用。虽然是基础性的，但已经过去了 Work测试这些预测的能力有限，因为它通常检查(I)二元关系，而不是 比更广泛的网络，(2)少数社会因素的影响，独立，和(3)短时间 跨度。这些限制与本科生的设置尤其相关，因为学生的社交生活集中在 广泛的社区，个人依靠这些社区获得社会支持。该项目将合并来自社会的工具 心理学、网络分析和神经科学，以提供丰富、准确和纵向的描述 随着时间的推移，社会联系如何支持年轻人的心理健康。我们的团队已经绘制了 由一大批即将入学的大学生组成的社交网络，并将其与 学生互动和心理健康指数的生态瞬时评估。我们找到了一本小说 有证据表明(I)“社会小气候”，如学生邻居的同理心，对个人有很好的影响 作为，(Ii)学生在压力下搜索他们的社交网络寻找支持的同伴，(Iii)同伴互动 随着时间的推移缓解压力，以及(Iv)孤独的学生忽视了密切的社会关系，没有充分利用社会 资源。在这里，我们将从几个方面展开这项工作。首先，我们将合并一个纵向 方法：衡量学生在大学生涯中的人际关系和幸福感。我们将联合起来 这些数据使用尖端预测模型来量化大学早期形成的社会关系是如何与 晚年的幸福感，以及学生随后的“心理健康轨迹”。第二，我们将招聘 一个纵向复制队列，以建立我们的影响的稳健性。第三，我们将在以前的基础上 我们团队的神经成像工作，以探测社会联系的神经“标志”，并检查他们的 随着时间的推移，与其他衡量联系的指标的关系，以及与幸福的关系。在基础科学的层面上，这 该项目将代表一种新的、自然主义的方法来研究心理健康中的社会因素，并产生 一个大规模、多方面的数据集，它将公开可用，以促进协作和 对社会关系的累积研究。在转换级别，生成的数据可以为策略铺平道路 旨在在广大人口中培养更强大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.