New research reveals how being alone is related to feeling lonely.
Psychology distinguishes feeling lonely from being socially isolated, but uses surveys to study both.We found that the relationship between being alone and feeling lonely is weak and curved.Being lonely is a feeling. It’s about feeling disconnected from others, not having the kind of social contact and communion you want with other people. It’s about how you perceive the world around you, and it’s related to your own particular needs and wants. That means it’s subjective.
For a long time, psychology has drawn a distinction between being lonely and being alone—but it’s been difficult to measure it precisely. Most previous psychologists have tried to study this distinction using surveys. Asking people about their feelings of loneliness is easy: people are in a good position to report how they feel. But getting a measure of how alone someone is—or their, as it is often called in the research literature—is harder.
Measuring how much time people spend alone is hard. How would you do it? Would you just sit around with a pen and clipboard watching what people did all day?Would you put up a video camera in their house, work, car, and every other place they are likely to stay? You could, but it would be really difficult to make sure you’re capturing their full day, since they might go somewhere new without cameras. Plus, think of all the time you’d have to sit watching video to see if they were alone or not.The way we ended up capturing time alone was through a sound recorder that the person wore with them throughout the day, over the course of several days.
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