Loneliness, Relationships and Self-Centeredness-Research

Loneliness not only feels bad, experts have characterized it as a disease that increases the risk of a range of physical and psychological disorders. Some national prevalence estimates for loneliness are alarming. Although they can be as low as 4.4 per cent (in Azerbaijan), in other countries (such as Denmark) as many as 20 per cent of adults report being either moderately or severely lonely. 

However, there’s no established way of identifying loneliness. Most diagnostic methods treat it as a one-dimensional construct: though it can vary in degrees, someone is either “lonely”, or they’re not. A new approach, outlined in a paper published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, suggests that loneliness should in fact be divided into three sub-types, two of which are associated with poor mental health. 

Philip Hyland at Trinity College Dublin and colleagues studied a nationally representative sample of 1,839 US adults aged between 18 and 70, all of whom had experienced at least one traumatic event in their lifetime. (This allowed the team to also look for associations between childhood or adult trauma and loneliness.) Most were married or living with a partner. 

Participants completed a six-item scale that measured feelings of “social loneliness” (focusing on perceptions of the quantity of one’s social relationships) and “emotional loneliness” (which focused on perceptions of the quality of one’s relationships). They also completed questionnaires assessing levels of childhood and adult trauma, depression and anxiety, and their psychological well being. 

Following convention, the 17.1 per cent of participants who scored a certain amount above the average loneliness score for the sample (by more than one standard deviation) were classified as “lonely” – a figure comparable to that found previously in many other countries.

However, the researchers also used a statistical technique to look for qualitative differences between the participants’ loneliness responses, and this revealed four distinct classes. 

The first class – which they called “low loneliness” – was characterized by low scores on both types of loneliness, social and emotional. Just over half the participants fell into this category. The second class – “social loneliness” – making up 8.2 per cent of the sample, comprised people low on emotional loneliness, but high on social loneliness. The third class – “emotional loneliness” – made up just over a quarter of the total sample and was characterized by the opposite pattern of high emotional loneliness but low levels of social loneliness. People in the fourth and final “social and emotional loneliness” class, accounting for 12.4 per cent of the sample, scored high for both types of loneliness.

The researchers found a clear gradient of psychological distress across the classes. People in the low loneliness class were, predictably, least distressed, followed by people in the “social loneliness” class, then the “emotional loneliness” class, and finally the “social and emotional loneliness” class. In fact, people in both these last two classes had levels of symptoms of depression, anxiety and negative psychological wellbeing that were reflective of a psychiatric disorder.

In other words, quality of relationships appears more important to mental health than the sheer number of them.“These results indicate that while the experience of social loneliness is associated with slight diminutions in overall mental health, relative to the low loneliness class, the experience of emotional loneliness has a substantially greater, and more negative impact on overall mental health status,” the researchers write. “The combination of social and emotional loneliness is associated with the poorest mental health status,” they note. 

People who belonged to the emotional loneliness class were more likely to be female, younger than average for the group, not in a relationship and to have suffered an increased number of childhood traumas. (Every childhood traumatic experience increased the odds of belonging to the emotional loneliness class by 28 per cent.) The same associations were true for the “social and emotional” loneliness class – except they were also characterized by a greater number of adult traumas. 

At 39.0 per cent, the total percentage of participants who fell into the two loneliness classes characterized by clinically relevant levels of psychological distress was much higher than the 17.1 per cent loneliness figure obtained using the conventional one-dimensional approach. “This finding indicates that by recognizing naturally occurring subtypes of loneliness, the number of people experiencing a form… that is likely to be of clinical relevance is more than double the number identified when loneliness is conceptualized as a uni dimensional construct,” the researchers note. 

The work suggests that in assessing loneliness, whether in an individual or at a national level, it’s important to recognize there are various sub types. It also supports findings from some other studies that it’s the quality, not quantity, of your relationships that really matters. As the researchers conclude: “From a societal perspective, and in the interests of reducing the burden of psychological distress, efforts should be made to enhance the quality of social connections as opposed to promoting the virtues of larger social networks.”

A Second Study Looked at Loneliness and Self-Centeredness

We usually think of loneliness as a condition with no redeeming features. Certainly, chronic loneliness is linked to poorer physical and psychological health, as well as unfavourable effects on personality. But an evolutionary model of loneliness, pioneered by John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago, US, proposes that it has an adaptive function, in that it:

1. makes people want to do something about absent or unsatisfactory social relationships, and
2. encourages people to focus on their own interests and welfare

The second proposed motivational force is the focus of a new study, led John Cacioppo, and published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. The researchers predicted that feelings of loneliness would make people more self-centred – and this is exactly what they found.

Cacioppo and his colleagues analyzed 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-centeredness; 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-centeredness the following year. Greater self-centeredness 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-centeredness are mutually reinforcing, although it’s possible the influence of some other factor(s) on both self-centeredness 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-centreness have a direct reciprocal relationship.

“The small but apparent influence of self-centeredness 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-centeredness as part of an intervention to lessen loneliness may help break a positive feedback loop that maintains or worsens loneliness over years.”

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