Personal Factors That Contribute To Loneliness Essay

This paper explores the personal and situational factors that contribute to loneliness. Loneliness had debilitating effects on health. Therefore, it is important to understand how it comes about. Additionally, I examine potential ways of dealing with loneliness on both a personal and situational level. In the first section, I review the literature on the cause of loneliness from the perspectives of social and personality psychology. Social psychology suggests that many situational factors affect loneliness (e.g., age, ethnicity, and mental status). Personality psychology demonstrates that many personal factors affect loneliness (e.g., neuroticism, extraversion, and emotional stability). In the second section, I review research on how to cope

The health consequences of loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (Holt-Lunstad, Smith, & Layton, 2010). Moreover, loneliness increases one’s chance of early death by 26% (Holt-Lunstad et. al., 2010). Loneliness also suppresses the immune system and can even make a cold more severe (LeRoy, Murdock, Jaremka, Loya, & Fagundes, 2017). Because of the debilitating effects of loneliness, it is critical to identify the root source. Current evidence suggests that the cause is two-fold. Research from social and personality psychology demonstrates that both situational factors and personality characteristics influence the development of loneliness.

Despite it being a pervasive condition, loneliness has only received attention by the scientific community in the last 40 years (Weiss, 1985). This may be due to the subjectivity of loneliness. Loneliness cannot be measured simply by the number of people in one’s social circle. It also includes the quality of relationships, which is a purely subjective measure. The development of the UCLA Loneliness Scale and the work of Weiss began the process of quantifying loneliness (Franklin,

Both the perception of loneliness and perception of its cause vary drastically over the lifetime. There is a significant curvilinear relationship between loneliness and age; loneliness is higher in young adulthood and old age (Rokach, 2000). Additionally, young adults appear to experience loneliness more acutely than the other age groups (Rokach, 2000). A second situational factor that relates to loneliness is ethnicity. Ethnic minorities have higher levels of loneliness than their native counterparts. Furthermore, their levels of loneliness are similar to their native countries’ average loneliness levels (Victor, Burholt, Martin, & Wendy, 2012). For example, Indians in the UK have similar loneliness levels to Indians living in India. This suggests that loneliness is not only affected by migrant status, but also by cultural