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

> **NIH NIH R01** · STANFORD UNIVERSITY · 2024 · $620,224

## Abstract

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 ...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10830293
- **Project number:** 5R01MH125974-04
- **Recipient organization:** STANFORD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Jamil Zaki
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $620,224
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-05-01 → 2026-02-28

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10830293

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10830293, Social factors in the mental health of young adults: Bridging psychological and network analysis (5R01MH125974-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10830293. Licensed CC0.

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