My research is primarily focused on social health, defined as the adequate quantity and quality of social relationships. While we know that social health is important, we do not have a strong sense of exactly how to measure it, how it changes over time, and the factors that shape and are shaped by social health. My research program aims to answer these three questions. Ultimately, I hope that this work helps researchers and practitioners create a clearer picture of why certain people undergo long periods of social disconnection, and the tools that we can use to help foster social connection in the general population.
In my research, I have examined multiple different ways to measure social health with the goal of creating a clearer picture of how it may vary both between- and within-individuals. For example, I recently examined how latent profile analysis can help us understand patterns of social health across multiple measures, including the number of friends, experiences with victimization, and social support. Currently, I am working on projects that use exploratory factor analysis to determine the latent factors underlying social health, and that use qualitative analysis to understand how people talk about their social health. This work sets a precedent for empirical ways to study social health and helps clarify the ways that future researchers can study it.
Representative paper: Arrington, M. N., Nishina, A., Hostinar, C. E., & Guyer, A. E. (2026). Identifying patterns and predictors of social health in adolescence using data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study. Developmental Psychology. Advance online publication. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/dev0002139.
I am especially interested in understanding how social health changes over time. Most of my prior work has focused on adolescence (10-19 years old) and emerging adulthood (20-30 years old) because these periods are marked by many large social-contextual transitions, such as starting high school, going to a residential college, entering the workforce, and building new intimate and romantic peer relationships. These transitions create potential challenges to maintaining social health, as evidenced by vulnerabilities to depression, anxiety, and loneliness during these periods. Therefore, I've aimed to assess how social health may change over time during adolescence and emerging adulthood. For example, my dissertation focused on social and mental health during the first year of college. Click the link below to see some of the findings from a poster I did halfway through my dissertation!
Link to poster: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1padI6VTqZ_DKp0mww6NLP4HGvI_BpiPS/view?usp=sharing
Lastly, I have focused on understanding the factors that influence and are influenced by social health. I already mentioned mental health, which I have primarily explored as an outcome of individual differences in social health during contextual transitions. I have also studied face processing abilities, including face identity recognition and face emotion perception, as potential outcomes of social health or tools used to shape social health. My early graduate work was spent building expertise in studying face recognition, from which I found data suggesting that recognition abilities differ not only between-persons (i.e., some people are better than others) but also within-persons (i.e., one person might be good with some faces and bad with others). This prompted a focus on dynamic associations between face recognition and social health in my dissertation. Recently, I have extended this further by looking at brain activity when viewing faces as associated with social health in adolescence.Â
Representative paper: Arrington, M. N., & Scherf, K. S. (2025). Investigating the stability of individual differences in face recognition behavior. Scientific Reports, 15(1), 9425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-90317-4.