Sociality or being around others is affected in many dysfunctions such as depression and social anxiety. However, the social disruption of loneliness is just one aspect of the experience. It has led mental health researchers to integrate work on loneliness and social support. This originated with awareness that social relations play a fundamental role in psychological well-being. However, the this subjective aspect is often described as something ‘private’, which obscures the experiential features that are essential to understanding loneliness.Ī common thread that runs through all the current definitions is the tendency to focus on social distress. In such definitions, loneliness is also regarded as a subjective experience. the discrepancy between the relationships we wish we had and those we perceive we have).
While other research has focused on cognitive aspects (e.g. Some have focused on the multifaceted nature of loneliness - addressing the interaction between specific behaviours (different forms of inhibited sociability), emotions (feeling unloved or unwanted) and thoughts of negative and self-depreciating nature.
Research has provided different definitions of loneliness. Making clear distinctions between loneliness and social isolation is particularly important in times of COVID-19 because new terminology (such as ‘social distancing’) is starting to appear in recent research to refer to experiences that may have some similarities with loneliness and social isolation but that are not exactly the same. This results in the widely recognized distinction between loneliness and social isolation being undermined. Interventions with the goal to increase social interactions carry the assumption that loneliness is the same as social isolation because they provide social exposure in response. However, this theoretical distinction is not always fully reflected in research on loneliness, let alone in interventions to lessen it. Many researchers acknowledge that loneliness and social isolation (a state of no physical contact with other people) are different constructs. Distinctions have been made between loneliness and social isolation, and between loneliness and solitude. How is loneliness defined? And what do these definitions say about what we understand of the phenomenon? Over the last few decades, an increasing amount of empirical research has involved a range of definitions of loneliness.
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