There has been a surge of interest in the connections between physical health, mental health, and social experiences such as interpersonal relationships, and loneliness. Current literature examining social participation and quality of life showed that social connection is important for psychological, emotional, and physical wellbeing. Loneliness is associated with mental health symptoms including depression, anxiety, and psychosis. Research links loneliness with increased mortality likely related to its correlation with health risk factors such as obesity, smoking, and physical inactivity. Longitudinal studies have found loneliness to be a predictor of future development of coronary heart disease, stroke, fatigue, and pain. Considering the increased prevalence of loneliness over the past few years, research examining the relationships between dimensions of social experience including loneliness, social connection, social support, and participation are crucial to help improve interventions aimed at increasing persons health and wellness. The current study examines relationships between college students’ physical health, mental health, and social experiences. Cross-sectional data examining physical and mental health, loneliness, social connection, social support, and social participation was collected from 74 college students via online self-report surveys. Based on prior research, we expect to find a positive association between physical health, mental health, social connection, perceived social support, and social participation. We also expect there will be a negative association between physical health, mental health, and loneliness.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) is a recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least 6 months. Prior research has shown that racial disparities are evident in ODD diagnoses of African American children (Feisthamel & Schwartz, 2009; Schwartz & Feisthamel, 2009). Our study seeks to examine cognitive representations of individuals with ODD to determine if these representations reveal racial biases. We employed reverse correlation methods to reveal participants’ (n = 76) cognitive representations of individuals with ODD. A different set of participants (n = 79) judged the classification images developed from the reverse correlation paradigm in terms of perceived racial typicality, perceived diagnosis of ODD, and gender. Results revealed significant differences such that the classification image for an individual diagnosed with ODD was more likely to be categorized as Black/Latinx compared to the unselected composite image, however no significant differences emerged for perceived gender (both images viewed as a boy) and marginally significant differences in perceived ODD diagnosis. Our study demonstrates that cognitive representations of the category ODD reflect racial biases with implications for racial disparities in clinical diagnosis and hopefully bias reduction.

Background: Social Vigilance is a psychosocial stress behavior that is characterized by the monitoring of one’s social environment for potential threats. There is a paucity of stress research investigating social vigilance as a potential behavioral pathway for psychological health outcomes. Individuals of racial-ethnic minority status may experience unique psychosocial stressors compared to their non-Hispanic white counterparts; due to this variance in stress burden race-ethnicity and acculturation may serve as moderators. Aims: The aim of the current study is to ascertain whether social vigilance is associated with depressive symptoms and whether this association is moderated by race-ethnicity and acculturation status. The hypotheses were twofold: 1. social vigilance is positively associated with depressive symptoms, and 2. this relationship is significantly greater in racial-ethnic minority groups compared with their non- Hispanic white counterparts. Methods: A multi-site, cross sectional study consisting of N = 3,283 diverse young adults was used as the secondary data source. Results: Preliminary results revealed a significant, positive association between social vigilance and depressive symptoms, b = 0.21, se = 0.14, 95% CI (0.18, 0.23), p < 0.001. A significant interactive effect between social vigilance and race-ethnicity on depressive symptoms was found, F (5, 2881) = 4.15, p = 0.001. Conclusion: Preliminary analyses revealed support for the first hypothesis as well as supporting evidence that the association between social vigilance and depressive symptoms varies significantly across racial-ethnic groups. Future analyses will deconstruct interaction effects to test the second hypothesis and assess acculturation as a moderator of this association in Latinos.