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Different kinds of loneliness – Having poor quality relationships is associated with greater distress than having too few
According to a new study, there are 4 different types of loneliness.
28 February, 2019
Loneliness not only feels bad, experts have characterised 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.
<p>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 href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00127-018-1597-8" target="_blank">a paper</a> published recently in <em>Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology</em>, suggests that loneliness should in fact be divided into three sub-types, two of which are associated with poor mental health. </p><p>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. </p><p>Participants completed a six-item scale that measured feelings of "social loneliness" (focusing on perceptions of the <em>quantity</em> of one's social relationships) and "emotional loneliness" (which focused on perceptions of the <em>quality</em> of one's relationships). They also completed questionnaires assessing levels of childhood and adult trauma, depression and anxiety, and their psychological wellbeing. </p><p>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.</p><p>However, the researchers also used a statistical technique to look for qualitative differences between the participants' loneliness responses, and this revealed four distinct classes. </p><p>The first class – which they called "low loneliness" – was characterised 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 characterised 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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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. </p><p>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 characterised by a greater number of adult traumas. </p><p>At 39.0 per cent, the total percentage of participants who fell into the two loneliness classes characterised 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 recognising 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 conceptualised as a unidimensional construct," the researchers note. </p><p>The work suggests that in assessing loneliness, whether in an individual or at a national level, it's important to recognise there are various subtypes. 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."</p><p>—<a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00127-018-1597-8" target="_blank">Quality not quantity: loneliness subtypes, psychological trauma, and mental health in the US adult population</a></p><p><a href="https://emmayoung.net/" target="_blank">Emma Young</a> (<a href="https://twitter.com/EmmaELYoung" target="_blank">@EmmaELYoung</a>) is Staff Writer at <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">BPS Research Digest</a></p><p>--This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com/" target="_blank"></a><a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/" target="_blank">BPS Research Digest</a>. Read the <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2018/04/03/another-nail-in-the-coffin-for-learning-styles-students-did-not-benefit-from-studying-according-to-their-supposed-learning-style/https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/02/20/different-kinds-of-loneliness-having-poor-quality-relationships-is-associated-with-a-greater-toll-than-having-too-few/" target="_blank">original article</a>.</p>
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The best treatment for depression lies in our evolutionary history
Thanks in no small part to the digitization of our social lives, depression is becoming a bigger and bigger issue in western societies. So how do we reverse it?
19 February, 2018
Thanks in no small part to the digitization of our social lives, depression is becoming a bigger and bigger issue in western societies. In the space of just one generation, we've closed ourselves off and now spend more time in front of screens — on average, 10 hours a day according to a Neilsen report — than we do with our loved ones. Author and journalist and author Johann Hari explains that this isn't at all how the human species is supposed to behave. He suggests more actual face time with people, more community, and above all: becoming the social creatures that we have been for millennia. Johann's new book is the fascinating Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions.
Before You Can Be with Others, First Learn to Be Alone
Time on your own means time to tell the difference between right and wrong.
12 November, 2017
Nighthawks by Edward Hopper (1942) via Wikimedia Commons
In 1840, Edgar Allan Poe described the ‘mad energy’ of an ageing man who roved the streets of London from dusk till dawn. His excruciating despair could be temporarily relieved only by immersing himself in a tumultuous throng of city-dwellers. ‘He refuses to be alone,’ Poe wrote. He ‘is the type and the genius of deep crime … He is the man of the crowd.’
<p>Like many poets and philosophers through the ages, Poe stressed the significance of solitude. It was ‘such a great misfortune’, he thought, to lose the capacity to be alone with oneself, to get caught up in the crowd, to surrender one’s singularity to mind-numbing conformity. Two decades later, the idea of solitude captured Ralph Waldo Emerson’s imagination in a slightly different way: quoting Pythagoras, he wrote: ‘In the morning, – solitude; … that nature may speak to the imagination, as she does never in company.’ Emerson encouraged the wisest teachers to press upon their pupils the importance of ‘periods and habits of solitude’, habits that made ‘serious and abstracted thought’ possible.</p> <p>In the 20th century, the idea of solitude formed the centre of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism and found refuge in the United States, Arendt spent much of her life studying the relationship between the individual and the <em>polis</em>. For her, freedom was tethered to both the private sphere – the <em>vita contemplativa</em> – and the public, political sphere – the <em>vita activa</em>. She understood that freedom entailed more than the human capacity to act spontaneously and creatively in public. It also entailed the capacity to think and to judge in private, where solitude empowers the individual to contemplate her actions and develop her conscience, to escape the cacophony of the crowd – to finally hear herself think.</p> <p>In 1961, <em>The New Yorker</em> commissioned Arendt to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi SS officer who helped to orchestrate the Holocaust. How could anyone, she wanted to know, perpetrate such evil? Surely only a wicked sociopath could participate in the Shoah. But Arendt was surprised by Eichmann’s lack of imagination, his consummate conventionality. She argued that while Eichmann’s <em>actions</em> were evil, Eichmann himself – the <em>person</em> – ‘was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions.’ She attributed his immorality – his capacity, even his eagerness, to commit crimes – to his ‘thoughtlessness’. It was his inability to stop and think that permitted Eichmann to participate in mass murder.</p> <p>Just as Poe suspected that something sinister lurked deep within the man of the crowd, Arendt recognised that: ‘A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.’ Eichmann had shunned Socratic self-reflection. He had failed to return home to himself, to a state of solitude. He had discarded the <em>vita contemplativa</em>, and thus he had failed to embark upon the essential question-and-answering process that would have allowed him to examine the meaning of things, to distinguish between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood, good and evil.</p> <p>‘It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong,’ Arendt wrote, ‘because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.’ It is not that unthinking men are monsters, that the sad sleepwalkers of the world would sooner commit murder than face themselves in solitude. What Eichmann showed Arendt was that society could function freely and democratically <em>only</em> if it were made up of individuals engaged in the thinking activity – an activity that required solitude. Arendt believed that ‘living together with others begins with living together with oneself’.</p> <p><span class="ld-dropcap">B</span>ut what if, we might ask, we become lonely in our solitude? Isn’t there some danger that we will become isolated individuals, cut off from the pleasures of friendship? Philosophers have long made a careful, and important, distinction between solitude and loneliness. In <em>The Republic</em> (<em>c</em>380 BCE), Plato proffered a parable in which Socrates celebrates the solitary philosopher. In the allegory of the cave, the philosopher escapes from the darkness of an underground den – and from the company of other humans – into the sunlight of contemplative thought. Alone but not lonely, the philosopher becomes attuned to her inner self and the world. In solitude, the soundless dialogue ‘which the soul holds with herself’ finally becomes audible.</p> <p>Echoing Plato, Arendt observed: ‘Thinking, existentially speaking, is a solitary but not a lonely business; solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company. Loneliness comes about … when I am one and without company’ but desire it and cannot find it. In solitude, Arendt never longed for companionship or craved camaraderie because she was never truly alone. Her inner self was a friend with whom she could carry on a conversation, that silent voice who posed the vital Socratic question: ‘<em>What do you mean when you say …?</em>’ The self, Arendt declared, ‘is the only one from whom you can never get away – except by ceasing to think.’</p> <p>Arendt’s warning is well worth remembering in our own time. In our hyper-connected world, a world in which we can communicate constantly and instantly over the internet, we rarely remember to carve out spaces for solitary contemplation. We check our email hundreds of times per day; we shoot off thousands of text messages per month; we obsessively thumb through Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, aching to connect at all hours with close and casual acquaintances alike. We search for friends of friends, ex-lovers, people we barely know, people we have no business knowing. We crave constant companionship.</p> <div class="video-callout-placeholder" data-slug="scott-barry-kaufman-on-capacity-for-solitude" style="border: 1px solid #ccc;">
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</div> <p>But, Arendt reminds us, if we lose our capacity for solitude, our ability to be alone with ourselves, then we lose our very ability to think. We risk getting caught up in the crowd. We risk being ‘swept away’, as she put it, ‘by what everybody else does and believes in’ – no longer able, in the cage of thoughtless conformity, to distinguish ‘right from wrong, beautiful from ugly’. Solitude is not only a state of mind essential to the development of an individual’s consciousness – and conscience – but also a practice that prepares one for participation in social and political life. Before we can keep company with others, we must learn to keep company with ourselves.<img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODM0MTE0NS9vcmlnaW4uZ2lmIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxODk5NDg4NH0.RTKSx9FyS5g9O0De6Ck42aIBTs8Vz-P13eah7_FaaWA/img.gif?width=980" id="20a42" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="36e416657481a4caf98d865f4be9cce0" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></p> <p>Jennifer Stitt</p> <p>--</p> <p>This article was originally published at <a href="https://aeon.co" target="_blank">Aeon</a> and has been republished under Creative Commons.</p>
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Feeling Lonely? You might be self-centered, says new research
These findings fit in with an overarching evolutionary theory on loneliness.
26 October, 2017
Credit: Getty Images.
Loneliness is usually a difficult emotion to divulge. We want to project to others that we have a vibrant and fulfilling social life. Of course, we all get lonely sometimes, but some far more often than others. Usually, divulging that one is lonely elicits compassion, empathy, or even pity on the part of the listener. But perhaps they shouldn't feel so, according to one long-term study out of the University of Chicago. It finds that those who are chronically lonely are more likely to be self-centered. The findings of the study were published in the journal Personality and Psychology Bulletin.
<p>To conduct it, researchers had 229 volunteers visit their lab once a year for 10 years. Each time, they were made to fill out a number of questionnaires. These contained questions about a volunteer's mood and experiences with <a href="https://digest.bps.org.uk/2017/10/25/ten-year-study-finds-loneliness-and-self-centeredness-appear-to-be-mutually-reinforcing/#more-31441" target="_blank" title="Research Digest">aspects of certain disorders</a>, such as depression. The battery of paperwork included the Chronic Self-Focus scale (to determine how self-centered they were), and the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (which assesses loneliness and social isolation).</p> <p>The study started during the 2002-2003 year. At that time, participants were ages 50-68 and either Caucasian, African-American, or Hispanic. They all came from Cook County, Illinois and were the three most prominent racial groups in that region at the time What researchers found was that loneliness increases self-centeredness. While self-centeredness in turn, increases loneliness—but to a far lesser extent. Those who reported higher levels of loneliness one year, usually reported higher levels of self-centeredness the next. So researchers believe the two emotions are mutually connected through a positive feedback loop.</p> <p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODM0MDk0NS9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYxNjQzNzcwM30.wfhcLA1Bx2SwbuhYeZmAcImvfwdtm8Mue_p2e6jG_fw/img.jpg?width=980" id="f7016" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="fd29d40f2639fa6fe4e15302b4acb2ef" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></p> <p><em>There's a growing number of seniors who are lonely and socially isolated, which is detrimental to their health. Credit: Getty Images. </em></p> <p>This study investigated a pioneering theory on loneliness posited by the U of Chicago's John Cacioppo, who led the study. He's a distinguished professor in psychology and the director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. “If you get more self-centered, you run the risk of staying locked in to feeling socially isolated," he said in a press release.</p> <p>While loneliness motivates someone to take steps to better their social lives, it also gives them a tendency to increase focus on their own interests, which might further solidify the problem. Besides a poorer quality of life, the chronically lonely endure poorer psychological and physical health and over time, even develop abnormal personality traits.</p> <p>They also have higher mortality rates than those with good social connections. This is the first study to test Cacioppo's theory on loneliness and self-centeredness. While this relationship was assumed, researchers were surprised to learn that self-centeredness also increased loneliness.</p> <p>Though the risks for the chronically lonely are significant, there's good news too. This research offers insight into how to help the chronically lonely break out of their negative spiral. “Targeting self-centeredness as part of an intervention to lessen loneliness may help break a positive feedback loop that maintains or worsens loneliness over time," researchers wrote.</p> <p class="shortcode-media shortcode-media-rebelmouse-image"><img type="lazy-image" data-runner-src="https://assets.rebelmouse.io/eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJpbWFnZSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vYXNzZXRzLnJibC5tcy8xODM0MDk0Ni9vcmlnaW4uanBnIiwiZXhwaXJlc19hdCI6MTYwMzQwNjY0N30.FTDcbiP9cozjHS5SJ3J1z0HB9NwuXTr8LNjtDTaQ30Y/img.jpg?width=980" id="63c51" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="97b462b0a510a0fa5dedba36d6caffa7" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image"></p> <p><em>Feeling isolated at work or in our commute is an increasingly common and widespread problem. Credit: Getty Images. </em></p> <p>One drawback, the study didn't prove causality. There may be another factor affecting both loneliness and self-centeredness. Even so, researchers say it suggests causality as depression and overall mood weren't affected by this positive feedback loop. The findings coincide with a growing neurobiological view that emotions have evolutionary functions. Loneliness these authors state, “is part of a warning system that motivates people to repair or replace their deficient social relationships."</p> <p>This squares with the emotion's evolutionary aim. Those who cannot relieve their loneliness naturally become more self-centered in order to better look after their own welfare. This helps the person in the short-term, but harms them long-term. “This evolutionarily adaptive response may have helped people survive in ancient times," Cacioppo said, “but in contemporary society may well make it harder for people to get out of feelings of loneliness."</p> <p>Today, more and more people are dealing with chronic loneliness. Former Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy calls it <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/10/04/this-former-surgeon-general-says-theres-a-loneliness-epidemic-and-work-is-partly-to-blame/?utm_term=.a77960cc4105" target="_blank" title="The Washington Post">a public health crisis.</a> In a recent piece in the <a href="https://hbr.org/cover-story/2017/09/work-and-the-loneliness-epidemic" target="_blank" title="The Harvard Business Review"><em>Harvard Business Review</em></a> he said that partly, how we work is to blame, as with many of our coworkers, we feel they're acquaintances rather than real confidants we can depend on. Since we're spending so much more time at work these days, it's beginning to affect us. This latest research should help us get a better grasp on loneliness as a public health problem and aid in the development of interventions to combat it.</p> <p>Want to know how loneliness effects your health? Watch this:</p> <p class="flex-video shortcode-media shortcode-media-youtube"><span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="e9ad76cbe5db676f526fe6fe40d0fcb2"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/es9RS-wnq94?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span></p>
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The difference between solitude and loneliness
We're more lonely than ever and this is horrible. Equally horrible? We can't bare to spend time alone.
09 August, 2017
Credit: Pixabay
‘All man’s miseries,’ wrote the French mathematician Blaise Pascal, ‘derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone’. Often in our busy lives this is caused by having too much to do. Sometimes it is our own inability to set down the smartphone and sit. Our go, go, go lives often leave us with little time for solitude. This is a shame, as many great minds argue, for being able to be alone with your own thoughts is a great skill that more people could use.
<p><strong>However, there is a difference between solitude and isolation, and it might kill you. </strong></p> <p>Some of us, <a href="http://bigthink.com/robby-berman/study-study-finds-very-smart-people-are-happier-alone?utm_campaign=Echobox&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#link_time=1502230122" target="_blank">particularly the more intelligent of us</a>, enjoy a quiet moment to ourselves every now and again. But others are truly lonely. This is more than just a negative feeling - it can have horrible effects on your health. Effects that we have a greater reason than ever for trying to understand.</p> <p><a href="http://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/08/lonely-die.aspx" target="_blank">Research suggests</a> that loneliness can dramatically increase the risk of death in individuals. It can even be a better predictor of early death than obesity. In a meta study of more than 200 studies covering hundreds of thousands of patients it was shown that “<strong>There is robust evidence that social isolation and loneliness significantly increase risk for premature mortality, and the magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health indicators</strong>,” according to lead researcher Holt-Lunstad.</p> <p>It is also known that chronic loneliness can cause a slew of specific health problems. <a href="http://bigthink.com/experts/johncacioppo" target="_blank">John Cacioppo</a> reports that it can even lead to “<strong>…increased levels of cortisol, a major stress hormone, as well as higher vascular resistance, which can raise blood pressure and decrease blood flow to vital organs… [and] the danger signals activated in the brain by loneliness affect the production of white blood cells; this can impair the immune system’s ability to fight infections</strong>.”</p> <p>This news would not shock Aristotle, <a href="http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.1.i.html" target="_blank">who argued two thousand years ago that friendship was a requirement for a good life</a>. Lacking friends, he posited, we would be unable to truly enjoy being human. The notion that we are biologically dependent on having some level of social interaction would only mean to him that we have an even greater obligation to educate individuals on how to make and be friends.</p> <p>He was on to something. Today, more than 40 million adults over 45 in the United States are believed to suffer from chronic loneliness. That image that you have of the sad old man in the nursing home is only partly true, however, as this statistic is also tied to other demographic changes. Such as a reduction in the marriage rate and the number of children per married couple. Though it is also true that older people can be at a higher risk of loneliness, <a href="http://bigthink.com/laurie-vazquez/how-to-beat-the-loneliness-epidemic" target="_blank">1 in 2 people over the age of 85 in the United States live alone.</a> This is an especially grim note, as <a href="http://www.seeyourfolks.com/" target="_blank">this link explains</a>, because the time they can expect to have left is remarkably short.</p> <p>However, at the same time, <a href="https://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/free-time-for-parents/" target="_blank">people complain of a lack of time to themselves</a>, and <a href="http://bigthink.com/articles/want-to-be-happier-buy-time-saving-services-study-suggests" target="_blank">s</a><a href="http://bigthink.com/articles/want-to-be-happier-buy-time-saving-services-study-suggests" target="_blank">tudies show that people are happiest when they are able to buy more time rather than things</a>. Hannah Arendt even alleged the inability to sit alone and think was a key reason Eichmann became a tool in the Holocaust. For her, the ability to sit and think by yourself, a key part of solitude, was a tool towards freedom. Without it, the tyranny of the majority, or even outright totalitarianism, would follow. The ability to be alone is the key to individuality, for Arendt.</p> <p><strong>But one man went farther, suggesting that loneliness was good for us. </strong> </p> <p>Schopenhauer, the ever-depressive philosopher, made the argument that the best of us would actually choose isolation. Deeming such people “<strong>Sages</strong>”, these people would be monastic; retreating from society, desire, and distraction to live simple lives. These rare few, so he alleged, were the truly happy people. Freed from vanity and pettiness they could go on to find intellectual pleasures, though even Schopenhauer was unable to make the switch to such a life.</p> <p>It is an odd paradox - we suffer both from loneliness and the inability to have time to ourselves. Technology has made us more connected than ever, and this has not made us happier or even less lonely. We are going to have to learn not only to re-connect, but to be alone as well. A paradox befitting of the modern, ultra-connected, age. </p>
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