10 Year Study Shows Loneliness and Self-Centeredness are Linked

The current pandemic and other world crises has been a major contributor to the increase of loneliness among people, creating significant mental health problems.

Recent research has shown that there is a link between loneliness and a focus on self or self-centeredness, and the cause cannot be exclusively attributed to external events.

What Is Loneliness?

Loneliness is accompanied by emotional suffering—the pain of feeling separate and disconnected. Loneliness as isolation is a deeply conflicted sense of the?fear?that one’s perceived inextricable attachments to others are being pulled and split apart, or are absent. Loneliness reflects a state of insecure?attachment?and “challenged bonding.” These are the common fears of loss all people experience. It is the disturbing sense of impending incompleteness, insecurity, and ungrounded-ness. The lonely person may feel inferior to others perceived as not lonely. Loneliness emanates from the mind’s intrinsic default tendency toward irreparable splitting into twos.

Research by S. Cacioppo and colleagues published in?Psychological Bulletin?shows chronic loneliness is linked to?poorer physical and psychological health. Research by M. Mund and colleagues published in the?Journal of Personality?shows loneliness can have a number of unfavorable effects on personality.

The Loneliness Pandemic?

A?new report suggests that 36% of all Americans—including 61% of young adults and 51% of mothers with young children—feel “serious loneliness.” Not surprisingly, loneliness appears to have increased substantially since the outbreak of the global pandemic.?

The report also explores the many types of loneliness, various causes of loneliness, and the potentially steep costs of loneliness, including early mortality and a wide array of serious physical and emotional problems, including depression, anxiety, heart disease, substance abuse, and domestic abuse. While Americans clearly need to adopt distancing measures to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, the report authors argue that we also must take steps to alleviate loneliness, particularly for the populations the survey suggests are most affected.

The report is based on an online survey of approximately 950 Americans in October 2020. Because of certain data limitations, the data should be considered preliminary.?In the survey of American adults, 36% of respondents reported serious loneliness—feeling lonely “frequently” or “almost all the time or all the time” in the four weeks prior to the survey. This included 61% of young people aged 18-25 and 51% of mothers with young children; 43% of young adults reported increases in loneliness since the outbreak of the pandemic. About half of lonely young adults in our survey reported that no one in the past few weeks had “taken more than just a few minutes” to ask how they are doing in a way that made them feel like the person “genuinely cared”; young adults suffer high rates of both loneliness and anxiety and depression. According to a recent CDC survey, 63% of this age group are suffering significant symptoms of anxiety or depression.

The Causes for Loneliness

Commonly, we attribute the cause of loneliness to external conditions such as an absence of social connections or traumatic events. But more recent research has pointed to internal factors in individuals.

An evolutionary model of loneliness, pioneered by John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago and published in?Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.?proposes that loneliness encourages people to focus on their own interests and welfare and that feelings of loneliness would make people more self-centred.?

Cacioppo and his colleagues analysed data on 229 people living in Cook County, Illinois, who came into the University of Chicago’s Social Neuroscience Laboratory for evaluation one day a year, for ten years. When the first data was collected, in 2002/3, the participants were aged 50-68, and came from the three largest racial/ethnic groups in the region: non-Hispanic White Americans, Black and African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

Each year, the participants completed a package of questionnaires, including measures of depression and mood, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (20-items measure general loneliness and feelings of social isolation) and the Chronic Self-Focus scale (designed to measure self-centredness; asks participants to indicate the extent to which they agree with statements like “I think about myself a lot”).

The researchers found that higher levels of loneliness reported in one year were associated with higher levels of self-centredness the following year. Greater self-centredness was also associated with more loneliness the following year, but the correlation was weaker. This was after the influence of all the demographic variables were accounted for statistically.

The findings suggest loneliness and self-centredness are mutually reinforcing, although it’s possible the influence of some other factor(s) on both self-centredness and loneliness is responsible for this apparent link. However, current depressed mood, symptoms of depression and overall negative mood were not significantly correlated with self-centredness or loneliness at the next year’s evaluation, supporting the interpretation that loneliness and self-centredness have a direct reciprocal relationship.

“The small but apparent influence of self-centredness on loneliness is noteworthy because it reveals yet another factor that may contribute to the development and/or maintenance of loneliness in real-world contexts,” the researchers wrote.

Stopping that process could help combat loneliness into middle and older age, they think. “Targeting self-centredness as part of an intervention to lessen loneliness may help break a positive feedback loop that maintains or worsens loneliness over years.”

Other research has shown that loneliness can result from irrational manifestations of unconscious envy (e.g., I am inferior because others always have more) and of conscious greed (e.g., I desperately need more than I have) in everyday life may be the most common underlying triggers of loneliness. They are the emotional articulations of a feeling of absence (e.g., inferiority and fear of loss), feelings silenced only by strivings toward acquisitiveness. Loneliness results in the feverish pursuit of clinging to persons and of gaining material objects. The pain of loneliness is a feeling that life is an emergency in need of immediate action—forming connections at all costs.

The state of painful loneliness is often accompanied by perceptions excessively directed to persons and objects outside oneself. This reflects the often-seen attempts of the lonely person to behave as if all his or her needs could be and must be satisfied only by the external environment rather than drawing from internal resources.

Since loneliness is a feeling of being isolated, unconnected, insecure, estranged, alienated, and empty, the natural defense of clinging and grasping is automatically elicited. People may experience it as an endless series of repetitive, temporary arrangements of adhering to another or, for example, holding on to possessions such as money, property, video games, toys, or power and control over others, or grasping a no-longer-adaptive ideology.?

Numerous commentators and the media have focused on the external events or conditions as the cause for loneliness, but this research seems to suggest that and internal focus would deserve better attention, particularly from a “what to do about it” perspective.?

In a study by Louise C. Hawley and John T. Cacioppo published in the?Annals of Behavioral Medicine?they conclude,?“social isolation is tantamount to feeling unsafe, and this sets off implicit hypervigilance for (additional) social threat in the environment. Unconscious surveillance for social threat produces cognitive biases: relative to nonlonely people, lonely individuals see the social world as a more threatening place, expect more negative social interactions, and remember more negative social information. Negative social expectations tend to elicit behaviors from others that confirm the lonely persons’ expectations, thereby setting in motion a self-fulfilling prophecy in which lonely people actively distance themselves from would-be social partners even as they believe that the cause of the social distance is attributable to others and is beyond their own control. This self-reinforcing loneliness loop is accompanied by feelings of hostility, stress, pessimism, anxiety, and low self-esteem and represents a dispositional tendency that activates neurobiological and behavioral mechanisms that contribute to adverse health outcomes.”

What to Do About Loneliness

Six qualitative reviews of the loneliness intervention literature have been published since 1984, and all explicitly or implicitly addressed four main types of interventions: (1) enhancing social skills, (2) providing social support, (3) increasing opportunities for social interaction, and (4) addressing maladaptive social cognition.?

All but one of these reviews concluded that loneliness interventions have met with success, particularly interventions which targeted opportunities for social interaction. Robin Findlay’s research published in the journal?Aging and Society, argued that less than half of the??intervention studies in his review supported the increasing social interaction as an effective strategy to decrease loneliness.

Hawley and??Cacioppo’s study?of loneliness argues that “loneliness may be diminished by reducing automatic cognitive biases that favor over-attention to negative social information in the environment. Accordingly, we posited that interventions such as cognitive behavioral therapy that involved training to identify automatic negative thoughts and look for disconfirming evidence, to decrease biased cognitions, and/or to reframe perceptions of loneliness and personal control would be more effective than interventions that targeted social support, social skills, or social access.”?