Identity, Social Connection, and Loneliness

By: Curtis Peterson © (post updated on April 3. 2025)

This blog describes the historical development of the study of loneliness

Early conceptions of loneliness associated the experience with dispositional and personality qualities rather than as part of normal social motivational processes. Additionally, these early conceptualizations posited that loneliness often leads to dysfunctional behaviors. For instance, studies focused on the “lonely housewife” engaging in infidelity (Sells, 1948) or the “lonely soldier” drinking excessively and engaging in sexually promiscuous behaviors (Frosdick, 1918). Indeed, as will be indicated later in this chapter, individuals who experience severe levels of loneliness can resort to dysfunctional ways to alleviate that loneliness. The issue with these early conceptualizations and their consequences is that they were anecdotal and were not measured by any objective means.

Regarding studies that directly address loneliness, according to the PsycINFO database, the earliest research was by Watson (1930), who examined what makes educated individuals happy. In this exploration, Watson found that loneliness was negatively associated with happiness, suggesting that loneliness was a dysfunctional process. Later, in 1948, research by Thompson found that individuals who scored high on different psychosis scales on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) also scored high on a subscale of loneliness. This led Thompson to conclude, similar to Watson in 1930, that loneliness was (a) a dysfunctional process and (b) more related to one’s disposition than situational or social experiences. Another aspect of Thompson’s research that influenced contemporary research is the notion that loneliness is closely related to depression and is a key symptom. Indeed, current research has found a strong association between the experience of loneliness in one time period (e.g., middle childhood) and the development of depression in a later time period (e.g., adolescence) (Zimmer-Gembeck, Trevaskis, Nesdale, & Downey, 2014). Additionally, depressive symptoms tend to include analogous experiences of loneliness (Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2014).

In contrast to Thompson (1948), who viewed loneliness as a feature of psychosis, Brooks (1933) asked rural psychiatrists whether social isolation (defined as monotony and lonesomeness) was the cause of psychosis. While the results were mixed, Brooks concluded that social isolation is symptomatic of psychosis but does not cause it. Rather, he concluded that poor socializing and coping skills that evolved from psychotic personality more likely lead to isolation and the experience of lonesomeness. This conclusion is used to explain the association between early experiences of loneliness and later experiences of depression (Jones et al., 2011; Anderson, Miller, Riger, Dill, & Sedikides, 1994; Cacioppo, Hawkley, & Thisted, 2010; Zimmer-Gembeck et al., 2014). For example, Jones et al. (2011) found an association between loneliness in middle school children and adolescents’ experience of depression. These authors concluded that the experience of loneliness in middle childhood thwarted these children’s ability to develop socializing skills necessary to form social relationships in adolescence, leading to depression. The problem with Brooks (1933) and Jones et al. (2011) conclusions is that they rely on descriptive and correlational methods, so it is purely theoretical how early experiences of loneliness predict later development of depression.

The next stage in the development of understanding loneliness came from Sullivan in 1953, who was one of the first to define loneliness as a developmental–personality process. That is to say, loneliness is driven by the person’s disposition and attachment that occurs in early childhood. This idea of attachment and loneliness is still supported in today’s literature (Baumeister & Leary, 1995); however, the notion of the lonely personality is not strongly supported (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010). Rather, loneliness is seen more as a need-driven state, similar to the need for food, where some individuals need a lot and some need just a little to sustain their functioning (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008). Probably the greatest legacy of Sullivan’s (1953) work is that it provided a consistent definition of loneliness as “the need for intimate exchange with fellow being … with respect to satisfaction and security” (p. 261), the loss of which, according to Sullivan, causes “the driving of this system may integrate interpersonal situations despite severe anxiety” (p. 262). In other words, the experience of loneliness creates a negative anxiety state that motivates an individual to relieve that negative state through interpersonal contact, despite the anxiety that accompanies the lonely state. While this definition was expounded on, specifically by Weiss (1973/1985), it remains the basic way psychologists have defined loneliness since.

The next evolution of the study of loneliness came in the 1970s with Weiss’s (1973/1985) book “Loneliness: The Experience of Emotional and Social Isolation.” In this work, Weiss argues that there are two types of loneliness. The first, which Weiss defined as emotional loneliness, is a negative affective state in which a person lacks close emotional ties with someone else. The second is social loneliness, or in Weiss’s terms, social isolation, a state of lacking sufficient social connections. Weiss used the term social isolation to emphasize that individuals who experience it evaluate not having a sufficient number of social connections and social support in their life. Social isolation differs from emotional loneliness in that emotional loneliness is the feeling of loss of close emotional relationship(s), whereas social isolation is a lack of sufficient social relationships, whether close emotional or utility social support type relationships. Research since Weiss has supported the notion that there are two different types of loneliness, mainly from psychometric evidence (Vassar & Crosby, 2008). The term social isolation continues to be used in contemporary research to define social loneliness, whereas the term loneliness often refers to emotional loneliness (Cacioppo, Cacioppo, & Capitanio, 2014). In addition to differentiating the two types of loneliness, Weiss (1973/1985) also introduced the idea that loneliness was not a dysfunctional process but rather an ordinary motivational socializing process. That is to say, according to Weiss, we are all driven to maintain a certain level of social and emotional connection, and when our subjective experience falls below that individual threshold, we experience the negative state of loneliness. This, according to Weiss, drives us