Anxiety, Depression, Loneliness, Stress
Conditions
Brief summary
The central goal of this project is to produce a novel, precise, and comprehensive account of social factors in young adult mental health - using a novel combination of network nominations, ecological momentary assessment, and neuroimaging methods. To that end, the investigators will collect data from two successive classes of college undergraduates (i.e., classes of 2023 and 2024) over the course of their collegiate tenure.
Detailed description
The proposed work will consist of four key components. The investigators will collect data from the class of 2023 in each of their remaining years at college, producing (i) longitudinal data that will allow them to probe the long-term mental health effects of connections made during the transition to college, as well as mental health issues and resilience in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic as a function of social connectedness. The investigators will leverage this rich dataset to build (ii) prospective quantitative models to predict mental health outcomes later in college based on a range of social factors measured early in college. They will further collect (iii) a longitudinal replication cohort, the class of 2024, allowing to establish the robustness of their initial findings across samples. Finally, the investigators will add (iv) a neuroimaging component to this dataset in a subset of the class of 2024. This will allow them to examine brain "markers" of connectedness, and add them to a prospective model, providing a novel integration across brain, behavior, and community levels of analysis, and a synthetic assessment of social factors in long-term mental health.
Interventions
BEHAVIORALExamination of students' naturally occurring social ties
In this observational study, features of students' social lives, such as the number of quality of relationships they form, and their subjective loneliness, will be used to predict their mental health and well being at later time points.
Sponsors
Stanford University
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Study design
Allocation
NA
Intervention model
SINGLE_GROUP
Primary purpose
BASIC_SCIENCE
Masking
NONE
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
ALL
Age
18 Years to No maximum
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
Stanford undergraduate students in the classes of 2023 and 2024, as well as all students who reside in their dorms. \-
Exclusion criteria
People under the age of 18 \-
Design outcomes
Primary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Depression | September 2021 - May 2024 | Score on self-reported depression measure: Center for Epidemiological Studies Scale - 10 item version. Range = 0 to 30. Higher scores indicate more depressive symptoms |
| Anxiety | September 2021 - May 2024 | Score on self-reported anxiety measure: State-Trait Anxiety Inventory - 20 item version. Range = 20 to 80. Higher scores indicate more symptoms of anxiety. |
Secondary
| Measure | Time frame | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Loneliness | September 2021 - May 2024 | Score on self-reported loneliness measure: University of California Loneliness Scale - 8 item version. Range = 1 to 5. Higher score indicate greater feeling of loneliness. |
| Stress | September 2021 - May 2024 | Score on self-reported stress measure: Perceived Stress Scale. Range = 1 to 3. Higher scores indicate greater feeling of stress. |
Countries
United States
Contacts
PRINCIPAL_INVESTIGATORJamil Zaki, PhD
Stanford University
Outcome results
None listed