Loneliness Feeds on Itself

When people don’t feel like their needs for connection to others are being met, they experience a feeling of loneliness. Everyone feels lonely every once in a while, but feeling lonely over the long-term is associated with many psychological and health problems. So, it is valuable to better understand what factors can lead loneliness to persist over time.

A paper by Edward Lemay, Jennifer Cutri, and Nadya Teneva published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2024 suggests an important way that loneliness can become a chronic condition. As you might expect, people feel lonely when they believe that other people are not supporting them and also when they believe that other people don’t really like them or think that they are good people. These authors suggest that feelings of loneliness decrease people’s sense that they are being cared for and whether other people have a good opinion of them. That feeling of a lack of care and regard by others then amplifies the feeling of loneliness in a vicious cycle.

This paper presented three studies that used similar methods. In each study, several hundred participants were enrolled in the study. In some studies, participants made judgments about a variety of different kinds of significant others (parents, friends, romantic partners) and some studies focused on romantic partners. I will describe one study from this paper as an example, but the results from all studies supported the same overall conclusions.

In Study 2 in the paper, more than 200 romantic couples participated. Each member of the couple rated their loneliness using an established scale. They rated how much they felt cared for by their partner and how much they held their partner in esteem. They also rated how much they felt cared for and highly-regarded by their partner. This study also had the couple identify some friends who knew them well who could rate how much each member of the couple cared for each other and held each other in high regard. Finally, the couple filled out a daily diary for two weeks in which they rated their daily loneliness, their care and regard for their partner, and how much they felt care and regard from their partner. Each member of the couple also rated their satisfaction with the relationship overall.

The results were consistent with the idea that loneliness affects the perception of feeling cared for and being held in high regard. Overall, people’s perception that they are cared for by their partner and held in high regard by their partner go up with the strength of the ratings of care and regard by their partner. That is, people are generally pretty accurate in judging the care and regard they receive. However, the lonelier a person rates themselves to be, the more they underestimate the care and regard they receive. That is, being lonely leads you to feel less cared for and less highly regarded than you actually are. The same result was observed when using the judgments of friends about care and regard, suggesting that lonely people really are misperceiving how much care and regard they receive.

The daily diary story told a similar story. The lonelier someone was on one day, the more they tended to underestimate the amount of care and regard they received from their partner on the following day.

There was one other important analysis. In this data set, the more care a partner shows and the higher the regard of that partner, the more that an individual feels satisfied with their relationship. Because loneliness decreases a person’s perception of care and regard, it also decreases their satisfaction with the relationship. So, lonely people’s misperceptions feed back and decrease their relationship satisfaction, which then makes them feel lonely.

This research suggests that when you are feeling lonely, you need to mistrust your perceptions of your relationships. Since you are likely to feel less well cared for and less highly regarded when you’re lonely than when you’re not, you should look for evidence of other people’s care and regard to help make you feel better about your relationships. Recognize that your loneliness can act to sustain itself, so you may need to work to snap yourself out of that cycle.