How well can university roommates judge each other ’s distress levels?

By Christian Jarrett With suicide among university students on the increase in England and Wales, there’s an urgent need to find better ways to support those students who are experiencing distress. Many campuses have provisions in place, such as student counselling services, but students often prefer to turn to their peers in times of need. This raises the possibility that students themselves are best placed to sound the alarm if and when one of their friends is going through a crisis. A new study from the US – where there are similar concerns about student mental health issues – has investigated how well college roommates are able to recognise each other’s levels of emotional distress. The findings, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, highlight the challenge of requiring students to look out for each other – generally, students who shared a room underestimated each other’s distress levels. And while students who were identified by their roommates as being very distressed were indeed more likely to actually be very distressed, many of them were not, which demonstrates the problem of false alarms. Qi Xu and Patrick Shrout at New York University recruited 187 same-sex pairs of students who shared a room together at college and had done so for at least five months (85 per cent of the pairs were female and just over half were White). In February and then again in April, the students rated how much over the previous six weeks they had...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Mental health Source Type: blogs