Dataset Information

Choking under pressure: Does it get easier with age? How loneliness affects social monitoring across the life span.

ABSTRACT: Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates reporting loneliness possessed the social monitoring skills necessary to read the emotions underlying others' facial expressions, but that they choked under social pressure. It has also been found that undergraduates reporting loneliness have better recall for both positive and negative social information than their non-lonely counterparts. Whether those effects are evident across different age groups has not been examined. Using data from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Loneliness Experiment that included participants aged 16-99 years (N = 54,060), we (i) test for replication in a larger worldwide sample and (ii) extend those linear model analyses to other age groups. We found only effects for participants aged 25-34 years: In this age group, loneliness was associated with increased recall of negative individual information, and with choking under social pressure during the emotion recognition task; those effects were small. We did not find any such effects among participants in other age groups. Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes may be associated with loneliness in different age groups, highlighting the importance of life-course approaches in this area.

SUBMITTER: Pearce E

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8727830 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Similar Datasets

Project description:BackgroundRecognition of loneliness as a health concern among adults stresses the need to understand the factors associated with loneliness. Research into factors of influence in the various phases of the adult life span (19-65 years) is scarce. Therefore, the associations between demographic, social and health-related factors and loneliness among young (19-34 years), early middle-aged (35-49 years) and late middle-aged adults (50-65 years) were explored.MethodsA secondary analysis with a large cross-sectional dataset was performed. Data was collected from September to December 2016 in the Netherlands, by a self-report survey. Loneliness was measured using the De Jong-Gierveld Loneliness Scale. In total, 26,342 adults (19-65 years) participated (response rate: 34%). Multiple logistic regression analyses were performed to examine associations between demographic, social and health-related factors as independent variables, and loneliness as dependent variable among the three age groups.ResultsPrevalence of loneliness among young, early and late middle-aged adults was 39.7, 43.3 and 48.2%, respectively. Living alone, frequency of neighbour contact, perceived social exclusion, psychological distress, psychological and emotional wellbeing were consistently associated with loneliness across the groups. The association between ethnicity and loneliness was stronger among young and early middle-aged adults, compared to late middle-aged adults. Young adults showed the strongest association between contact frequency with friends and loneliness. The strength of association between financial imbalance and loneliness gradually decreased from young to late middle-aged adults. Educational level was associated with loneliness among young adults only, while an association between employment status and loneliness was found solely among early middle-aged adults. For late middle-aged adults only, perceived health was associated with loneliness. Frequency of family contact was associated with loneliness, only among early and late middle-aged adults.ConclusionThis study indicates that factors associated with loneliness across the adult life span may be understood from an age-normative life-stage perspective. Accordingly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to reduce loneliness among adults, suggesting that a variety of interventions or an indirect approach may be necessary. Future research should focus on causal relations between factors and loneliness in different age groups, using a longitudinal research-design with, preferably, an even broader set of factors.

Dataset Information

Choking under pressure: Does it get easier with age? How loneliness affects social monitoring across the life span.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets