Relation between social network and psychological distress among middle-aged adults in Japan: Evidence from a national longitudinal survey.

It is widely documented that psychological distress is negatively associated with social networks involvement. However, despite the theoretical postulations that social networks are crucial for alleviating psychological distress, no study has yet empirically confirmed the causality of this relationship. Thus, we used the random-effects generalized least squares method to investigate the effect of one- and two-year lagged values for involvement in social networks on psychological distress.