David Sbarra and the Impact of Social Connection on Public Health 

Image above: Dr. Sbarra celebrates the end of the semester with then graduate students, Dr. Rita Law and Dr. Lauren Lee, December 2007.

David Sbarra began studying social relationships and health at an integral time for the fields of clinical and social psychology.  

When he joined the University of Arizona and founded the Laboratory for Social Connectedness and Health in 2004, the field was still largely undefined.  

“No one really knew what the term social connectedness meant,” Sbarra said. “I certainly didn’t know, so it was a bit of a risk to center the work in my lab on this still-being-defined area of study.” 

Since then, the importance of social connection has been widely acknowledged. The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General’s report, for example, focused on the healing effects of social connection and community. The report was titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. 

Sbarra is a clinical psychologist whose research sits at the intersection of clinical, health, social, and developmental psychology fields. He is also an APS Fellow, editor of APS’s journal Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, and past president of the Academy of Psychological Clinical Science.  

Learn more about APS’s Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.

“To best advance my research program, I have become very interested in open scientific practices, transparency, reproducibility, and trying to improve our scientific practices across the field,” he said. 

Over the course of his career so far, Sbarra identified three research papers that he feels have made notable contributions and have implications for better understanding human health and well-being. The first of these focused on human attachment. 

The 2008 paper proposed a framework for understanding how multiple biological and psychological systems are regulated in adult relationships, particularly in the context of attachment, separation, and experiences of loss. Sbarra and his coauthor, APS Fellow Cindy Hazan (Cornell University), spoke to the disruption of coregulation, showing successful recovery from behavioral dysregulation is dependent on adopting a strategy of self-regulation.  

“One of the main contributions of this paper,” Sbarra remarked, “was the argument that in order to understand how adults respond to loss, we need to better understand the functional components of the adult attachment system. How do attachment bonds regulate our psychology and physiology?”  

The second project focused on divorce and health. Sbarra published a 2011 meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science with University of Arizona colleagues Rita Law and Robert Portley that integrated research on divorce and death risk. The analysis looked at 32 studies, which included more than 6.5 million people from 11 countries, and found a significant increase in risk for early death among adults who had been divorced or separated when compared to married individuals.  

“That was a critical paper in my research program because then we established that divorce was associated with risk for early death, and we then started trying to investigate some of the mechanisms that might explain how these broad-based epidemiological effects unfolded,” he said.  

In 2017, Sbarra published a paper with APS Fellow Julianne Holt-Lunstad (Brigham Young University) and Theodore Robles (University of California, Los Angeles) in American Psychologist about advancing social connections and health as a public health priority. 

“In this paper, we addressed the question of what would it mean to take the quality of our social relationships seriously as a priority area for public health, not just about social determinants of health, but actual interpersonal relationships, the quality of our closest, intimate relationships, whether or not you feel connected to other people in your immediate community,” Sbarra said. “This spurred and spawned a lot of different research and garnered some exciting attention.” 

In recent years, Sbarra has taken a step back and cast a more critical eye on his research, exploring whether factors like loneliness and divorce truly increase individual risk for poor health outcomes or if the mechanisms that increases that risk are related to other linked factors like depression or cardiovascular disease, for example.  

“I’ve started to get into the business of questioning the causal effects and where the causal effects exist and operate,” he said. 

Though Sbarra acknowledges that academic systems are often designed to reinforce researchers advocating for their own hypotheses and theories, he emphasized that it is important to be able to do both—build on your own hypotheses while simultaneously questioning them.  

“One of the problems with the way science operates is that we favor and champion a hypothesis and then we sort of advance that hypothesis in a program of research,” Sbarra said. “I think that in a lot of ways that created an ecosystem, a culture of science, in which we were always championing those effects.” 

Sbarra sees an opportunity to expand this way of thinking alongside the open science movement, creating space to pursue better falsification of one’s own work. And, in his view, this transition is already underway as more scientists submit Registered Reports in place of the traditional publication process. Registered Reports are a new style of scientific paper in which authors submit papers prior to the results of a study; peer review is “results free” and focuses on the merit of the idea and the question of whether the findings will be of interest to the field regardless of the significance.  

“I don’t want to sound overly enthusiastic, but I feel in a decade the uptake of the Registered Report will be so great that potentially the majority of scientific papers will be written this way,” he said. “I hope we will see a sea change in the culture of how we do science, and, to me, this change will allow younger people to really commit to severe tests and falsification strategies.” 

In addition to his passion for scientific integrity, Sbarra is also committed to communicating how his research can make a real-world difference in society, especially during a time when he sees many of the world’s problems as inherently psychological—rooted in critical thinking, misinformation, and attention, for example.  

In early 2025, Sbarra created a newsletter on Substack, an online platform for individuals to easily publish content, to share his thoughts about how psychological research connects to the current political environment in the United States. For example, one essay called “APA Ethics, DEI, Political Ideology, and the Need for Moral Courage” explores what happens when professional ethics in psychology collide with political ideology.  

“By embodying moral courage, psychologists—and the institutions in which they work—uphold their commitment to integrity and the greater good, ensuring ethical standards prevail in challenging and desperate times,” Sbarra wrote.  

Sbarra started the Substack to share his thoughts and academic expertise during a time when research institutions are facing political and existential uncertainty. But so far, the audience for such an effort has been limited to those already within his social circle. Still, Sbarra sees it as essential for those who are in protected positions to speak up.  

“One of the dominant feelings of people who work in higher education is that our institutions are under serious assault and that there is a large-scale effort to undermine what is offered in higher education,” he said. “I’m a full professor, and I think that it’s important for me to speak out about the importance of the educational work that happens not just here at the University of Arizona but in all corners of this country.” 

Presently, among his other activities, Sbarra teaches graduate ethics in the clinical psychology program at the University of Arizona. His desire and efforts to speak publicly about current events come from his understanding of moral philosophy.  

“The ethics of care is a moral philosophy that centers close relationships, empathy, and interpersonal responsibility—especially for more dependent or vulnerable populations— when thinking about just and righteous decision,” he said. “The philosophy connects well to my research program and makes me feel highly motivated to speak out, especially during a time in which many vulnerable people cannot.”  

Feedback on this article? Email [email protected] or login to comment. 

References 

Holt-Lunstad, J., Robles, T. F., & Sbarra, D. A. (2017). Advancing social connection as a public health priority in the United States. American Psychologist, 72(6), 517–530. 

Sbarra, D. A., & Hazan, C. (2008). Coregulation, dysregulation, self-regulation: An integrative analysis and empirical agenda for understanding adult attachment, separation, loss, and recovery. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 12(2), 141–167. 

Sbarra, D. A., Law, R. W., & Portley, R. M. (2011). Divorce and death: A meta-analysis and research agenda for clinical, social, and health psychology. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6(5), 454–474.