Abstract
College students commonly experience psychological distress when faced with intensified academic demands and changes in the social environment. Examining the nature and dynamics of students’ affective and behavioral experiences can help us better characterize the correlates of psychological distress. Here, we leveraged wearables and smartphones to study 49 first-year college students continuously throughout the academic year. Affect and sleep, academic, and social behavior showed substantial changes from school semesters to school breaks and from weekdays to weekends. Three student clusters were identified with behavioral and affective dissociations and varying levels of distress throughout the year. While academics were a common stressor for all, the cluster with highest distress stood out by frequent report of social stress. Moreover, the frequency of reporting social, but not academic, stress predicted subsequent clinical symptoms. Two years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first-year cluster with highest distress again stood out by frequent social stress and elevated clinical symptoms. Focus on sustained interpersonal stress, relative to academic stress, might be especially helpful to identify students at heightened risk for psychopathology.
Highlights
College students commonly experience psychological distress when faced with intensified academic demands and changes in the social environment
We present the results of our two main research goals: (1) a description of the temporal dynamics of the average student’s daily stress, sleep, physical activity, and academic and social behavior, and (2) an exploration of student subgroups with distinct affectivebehavioral phenotypes and patterns of psychological distress
We extend these results with a 3-month follow-up study with the same students during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing for the prospective replication of the student subgroup patterns
Summary
College students commonly experience psychological distress when faced with intensified academic demands and changes in the social environment. In addition to completing demanding classes, assignments and exams, students must adapt to a different social environment, make new friends while managing previous social relationships, and deal with roommates, finances, and health matters with increased independence from their childhood caregivers These various academic, social, and personal demands, in addition to students’ oftentimes poor sleep and physical activity, can all contribute to psychological distress and increased vulnerability to mental illness[1,2,3,4,5]. Recent studies with students across college years have used these tools to collect a wide variety of passive sensing and survey-based measures over several weeks, including sleep, mobility, and studying and socializing behaviors Researchers have adopted this deep phenotyping approach to describe behavioral patterns and predict students’
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