Eyre Robert W, House Thomas, Hill Edward M, Griffiths Frances E
Centre for Complexity Science, Zeeman Building, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2017 Sep 20;4(9):170336. doi: 10.1098/rsos.170336. eCollection 2017 Sep.
Recent research has provided evidence that mood can spread over social networks via social contagion, but that, in seeming contradiction to this, depression does not. Here, we investigate whether there is evidence for the individual components of mood (such as appetite, tiredness and sleep) spreading through US adolescent friendship networks while adjusting for confounding by modelling the transition probabilities of changing mood state over time. We find that having more friends with worse mood is associated with a higher probability of an adolescent worsening in mood and a lower probability of improving, and vice versa for friends with better mood, for the overwhelming majority of mood components. We also show, however, that this effect is not strong enough in the negative direction to lead to a significant increase in depression incidence, helping to resolve the seeming contradictory nature of existing research. Our conclusions, therefore, link in to current policy discussions on the importance of subthreshold levels of depressive symptoms and could help inform interventions against depression in high schools.
近期研究已提供证据表明情绪可通过社会传染在社交网络中传播，但与此看似矛盾的是，抑郁却并非如此。在此，我们研究是否有证据表明情绪的各个组成部分（如食欲、疲劳和睡眠）在美国青少年友谊网络中传播，同时通过对随时间变化的情绪状态转变概率进行建模来调整混杂因素。我们发现，对于绝大多数情绪组成部分而言，拥有更多情绪较差的朋友与青少年情绪恶化的概率较高以及改善的概率较低相关，而拥有更多情绪较好的朋友则反之。然而，我们也表明，这种负面影响不够强烈，不足以导致抑郁发病率显著上升，这有助于解决现有研究中看似矛盾的性质。因此，我们的结论与当前关于亚阈值抑郁症状重要性的政策讨论相关联，并可为高中阶段的抑郁干预提供参考。
