Recently published research suggests you may feel less lonely as you get older. Additionally, it’s shown that feelings of loneliness are less prevalent in collectivist societies than individualistic ones, and that it’s felt less among women than men.
The research appears in the journal Personality and Individual Differences and pulls from a newly published global dataset the BBC collected for its "Loneliness Experiment," according to Medical News Today.
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In the study, the authors drew on a large and varied new dataset to look into how culture, age and gender affect loneliness. Focusing on a subset of data that included people who indicated their age and specified that they were a man or a woman, researchers used data from 46,054 people in total.
Authors used a previous study that assigned relative individualism or collectivism to 101 countries. They drew on that information to determine the participants' level of individualism or collectivism. Participants from the current study included only people who specified they were from one of those 101 countries.
Researchers asked participants if they felt isolated from others and is they felt a lack of companionship, among other things. Participants then rated their feelings on a scale from one to five and indicated the frequency with which they experienced such feelings. One meant they never felt that way, five meant they always did.
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While the authors found that loneliness was experienced more among men and individualistic people, it also decreased with age. They couldn’t explain why that was.
“Contrary to what people may expect, loneliness is not a predicament unique to older people. In fact, younger people report greater feelings of loneliness,” said lead study author Manuela Barreto of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom. “Since loneliness stems from the sense that one’s social connections are not as good as desired, this might be due to the different expectations younger and older people hold. The age pattern we discovered seems to hold across many countries and cultures.”
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As for why men experience more loneliness than women, co-author and professor Pamela Qualter of the University of Manchester, U.K, said: “The existing evidence is mixed. There is an awareness that admitting to feeling ‘lonely’ can be especially stigmatizing for men.”
Still, the authors note that the study’s findings are not representative and the effects of the variables were relatively small. But based on the size of the study, they said “those effects are real and that loneliness is a fairly universal experience across demographic categories.”
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