ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Health Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1611264
Longitudinal Network Analysis of Mental Health Trends in Chinese University Freshmen: A Decadal Study (2014-2023)
Provisionally accepted
- 1North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
- 2Capital University of Economics and Business, Beijing, Beijing Municipality, China
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Against the backdrop of global mental health deterioration among young adults, this study employed network analysis to investigate the psychopathological architecture of 24,047 university freshmen assessed annually through the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) over a ten-year period (2014-2023). The findings revealed that: (1) The structure of the mental health network remained stable over time, with anxiety, depression, and interpersonal sensitivity consistently occupying central positions within the network, highlighting these as prominent symptoms among college students. (2) When ranking symptoms by nodal strength, the results indicated the following order: anxiety, depression, interpersonal sensitivity, psychoticism, obsessive symptoms, paranoia, hostility, phobia, and somatization. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding of the core psychological challenges faced by college students and offer valuable perspectives for the development of targeted mental health interventions and treatments.
Keywords: Freshmen, Network analysis, SCL-90, time series, Mental Health
Received: 14 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Lyu, Teng, Wang, Liu, Dong and Wu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Shaobo Lyu, North China University of Science and Technology, Tangshan, China
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