Lecture 5: Loneliness

Question 1

Formal definition Loneliness (Peplau & Perlman, 1982)

Answer 1

Loneliness corresponds to a discrepancy between an individual’s preferred and actual social relations

Question 2

Biological explanation for loneliness

Answer 2

Key need for survival: Act together as a social species
Aversive signal: Loneliness
Intended response: Get connected

Question 3

Baumeister and Leary paper on The Need to Belong

Answer 3

The need is for frequent, nonaversive interactions within an ongoing relational bond. People form social attachments readily under most conditions and resist the dissolution of existing bonds.
Lack of attachments is linked to a variety of ill effects on health, adjustment, and well-being.

Question 4

Believing another likes or dislikes you: behaviors making the beliefs come true

Answer 4

Experiment where subjects were led to believe someone else liked them or disliked them. Their beliefs about if someone liked them or not led that to actually be true

Question 5

Repulsion and Isolation cycle

Answer 5

Perceived Social Isolation -> Motivation to connect + hypervigilance for social threats -> Confirmatory + Attentional + Memory biases -> Behavioral confirmation processes -> More negative displays, social interactions, and affect -> PSI

Question 6

Cognitive biases and loneliness

Answer 6

• Attention bias: experiment shows that lonely children are hypervigilant for social threats
• Interpretation bias: people feeling more lonely often interpret certain social behaviours of others more negatively
• Attribution bias: lonely people often attribute failure in social interactions to themselves and see it as enduring and unchangeable

Question 7

Loneliness interventions

Answer 7

• Improving social skills
• Enhancing social support
• Increasing opportunities for social contact
• Addressing maladaptive social cognition (only moderate effectiveness, still elevated post loneliness intervention)

Question 8

Why Loneliness interventions often fail

Answer 8

Complexity and diversity are often overlooked.
Viewing loneliness as a unidimensional construct.
Targeting only one contributing factor.

Question 9

Pilot intervention loneliness

Answer 9

• More personalised approach, setting personalised social goals.
• Including more maintaining factors, Guided attention in social situations, Challenging maladaptive thoughts, Practising interpersonal skills

Question 10

3 dimensions of loneliness

Answer 10

1. Intimate/emotional loneliness: the perceived absence of a significant someone (e.g., a spouse), that is, a person one can rely on for emotional support during crises, who provides mutual assistance, and who affirms one’s value as a person.
2. Relational/social loneliness: It refers to the perceived presence/absence of quality friendships or family connections, that is, connections from the “sympathy group”.
3. Collective loneliness: Collective loneliness refers to a person’s valued social identities or “active network” (e.g., group, school, team, or national identity) wherein an individual can connect to similar others at a distance in the collective space.