Prospective associations between loneliness and emotional intelligence

Loneliness has been linked cross-sectionally to emotional skill deficits (e.g., Zysberg, 2012), but missing from the literature is a longitudinal examination of these relationships. The present study fills that gap by examining the prospective relationships between loneliness and emotional functioning in young adolescents in England. One hundred and ninety-six adolescents aged 11-13 years (90 females) took part in the study and completed the youth version of the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT-YV) and the peer-related subscale of the Loneliness and Aloneness Scale for Children and Adolescents (LACA) at two time points, which were 10 months apart. Prospective associations were obtained for male and female adolescents separately using cross-lagged statistical techniques. Our results showed prospective links between understanding and managing emotions and loneliness for both females and males. Perceiving and using emotions were prospectively linked to loneliness in males only. Possible explanations and directions for future research are discussed

Embedding Outreach into the Undergraduate Science Curriculum – Everyone's a Winner

This article summarizes the authors' experience of developing and delivering undergraduate modules in Science Communication. The modules address two needs: resourcing science outreach activities for children in Years 5-7, and developing transferable skills (oral and written communication, team working, time management) to enhance student employability and engagement.Keywords:  Employability, outreach, transferable skill

Prevalence and Social Inequality in Youth Loneliness in the UK.

Using data from the English arm of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study, we examined the prevalence of loneliness for school-aged adolescents and how it is linked to social inequalities. The HBSC study collects data from 11-, 13-, and 15-year-olds, and is repeated every four years, allowing the exploration of prevalence rates of loneliness pre COVID-19 pandemic for comparison. We also explored whether loneliness was associated with socio-economic status (SES) and linked to academic attainment and health complaints. The total sample was 14,077 from 156 schools in England. Findings revealed a stable prevalence rate of 8.2% for loneliness from 2006 to 2014. We also found, across all survey years, (1) those aged 15 years were significantly lonelier than younger peers, (2) those who reported lower SES were lonelier than their more well-off peers, and (3) higher loneliness was associated with being '"below average" academically and reporting more health complaints. Conclusions: These prevalence data enable researchers, policymakers, and others to make comparisons with prevalence rates during the COVID-19 pandemic to explore whether there have been increases in loneliness among school-aged adolescents. Loneliness was consistently related to social inequalities, suggesting that targeted interventions that include whole systems changes are needed

Loneliness Around the World: Age, Gender, and Cultural Differences in Loneliness

© 2020 The Authors. The BBC Loneliness Experiment provided a unique opportunity to examine differences in the experience of lonelines across cultures, age, and gender, and the interaction between these factors. Using those data, we analysed the frequency of loneliness reported by 46,054 participants aged 16–99 years, living across 237 countries, islands, and territories, representing the full range of individualism-collectivism cultures, as defined by Hofstede (1997). Findings showed that loneliness increased with individualism, decreased with age, and was greater in men than in women. We also found that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness, although those interactions did not qualify the main effects, and simply accentuated them. We found the most vulnerable to loneliness were younger men living in individualistic cultures.Wellcome Trust [Funder reference: 209625/Z/17/Z]

Childhood loneliness as a predictor of adolescent depressive symptoms: an 8-year longitudinal study

Childhood loneliness is characterised by children’s perceived dissatisfaction with aspects of their social relationships. This 8-year prospective study investigates whether loneliness in childhood predicts depressive symptoms in adolescence, controlling for early childhood indicators of emotional problems and a sociometric measure of peer social preference. 296 children were tested in the infant years of primary school (T1 5 years of age), in the upper primary school (T2 9 years of age) and in secondary school (T3 13 years of age). At T1, children completed the loneliness assessment and sociometric interview. Their teachers completed externalisation and internalisation rating scales for each child. At T2, children completed a loneliness assessment, a measure of depressive symptoms, and the sociometric interview. At T3, children completed the depressive symptom assessment. An SEM analysis showed that depressive symptoms in early adolescence (age 13) were predicted by reports of depressive symptoms at age 8, which were themselves predicted by internalisation in the infant school (5 years). The interactive effect of loneliness at 5 and 9, indicative of prolonged loneliness in childhood, also predicted depressive symptoms at age 13. Parent and peer-related loneliness at age 5 and 9, peer acceptance variables, and duration of parent loneliness did not predict depression. Our results suggest that enduring peer-related loneliness during childhood constitutes an interpersonal stressor that predisposes children to adolescent depressive symptoms. Possible mediators are discussed

Investigating hyper-vigilance for social threat of lonely children

The hypothesis that lonely children show hypervigilance for social threat was examined in a series of three studies that employed different methods including advanced eye-tracking technology. Hypervigilance for social threat was operationalized as hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion in a variation of the hostile attribution paradigm (Study 1), scores on the Children’s Rejection-Sensitivity Questionnaire (Study 2), and visual attention to socially rejecting stimuli (Study 3). The participants were 185 children (11 years-7 months to 12 years-6 months), 248 children (9 years-4 months to 11 years-8 months) and 140 children (8 years-10 months to 12 years-10 months) in the three studies, respectively. Regression analyses showed that, with depressive symptoms covaried, there were quadratic relations between loneliness and these different measures of hypervigilance to social threat. As hypothesized, only children in the upper range of loneliness demonstrated elevated hostility to ambiguously motivated social exclusion, higher scores on the rejection sensitivity questionnaire, and disengagement difficulties when viewing socially rejecting stimuli. We found that very lonely children are hypersensitive to social threat

Loneliness and the recognition of vocal socioemotional expressions in adolescence

Lonely individuals show increased social monitoring and heightened recognition of negative facial expressions. The current study investigated whether this pattern extends to other nonverbal modalities by examining associations between loneliness and the recognition of vocal emotional expressions. Youth, ages 11–18 years (n = 122), were asked to identify the intended emotion in auditory portrayals of basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) and social expressions (friendliness, meanness). Controlling for social anxiety, age, and gender, links between loneliness and recognition accuracy were emotion-specific: loneliness was associated with poorer recognition of fear, but better recognition of friendliness. Lonely individuals’ motivation to avoid threat may interfere with the recognition of fear, but their attunement to affiliative cues may promote the identification of friendliness in affective prosody. Monitoring for social affiliation cues in others’ voices might represent an adaptive function of the reconnection system in lonely youth, and be a worthy target for intervention

Schools and education

Children in the North are more likely to live in poverty than those in the rest of England – and increasingly so. Poverty is the lead driver of inequalities between children in the North and their counterparts in the rest of the country, leading to worse physical and mental health outcomes, educational attainment, and lower lifelong economic productivity. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this situation worse. Although the full impact is not yet known, modelling suggests that, without intervention, the outlook is bleak. To address the North-South productivity gap we must tackle the stark inequalities evidenced in this report, put in place a child-first place-based recovery plan, and enable the children of the North to fulfil their potential

Exploring the Frequency, Intensity, and Duration of Loneliness: A Latent Class Analysis of Data from the BBC Loneliness Experiment

This is the final version. Available on open access from MDPI via the DOI in this recordData Availability Statement: These data are available upon request from the corresponding author.Almost all measures of loneliness have been developed without discussing how to best conceptualize and assess the severity of loneliness. In the current study, we adapted the four-item UCLA, so that it continued to measure frequency of loneliness, but also assessed intensity and duration, providing a measure of other aspects of loneliness severity. Using data from participants resident in the UK who completed the BBC Loneliness Experiment (N = 36,767; F = 69.6%) and Latent Class Profile Analyses, we identified four groups of people who scored high on loneliness on at least one of the three severity measures. Duration of loneliness often over months or years seemed to be particularly important in distinguishing groups. Further, group membership was predicted by important demographic and psychological variables. We discuss the findings in terms of implications for research and practice. We highlight the need to explore these profiles longitudinally to investigate how membership predicts later mental and physical health, and well-being.Wellcome Trus