[Psychological and social factors predictive of loneliness: a cognitive and behavioral approach]

The objective of the present study was to explore the psychological and social mechanisms leading to loneliness. Based on cognitive and behavioral approaches developed in health psychology, we tested several models that might allow one to predict certain determinants of the feeling of loneliness. Included in the study were 45 individuals suffering from loneliness who had come to one of several Centres Thérapeutiques de Lutte contre l'Isolement "Recherche et Rencontres". The subjects were asked to respond to four scales: the UCLA loneliness scale, Cattell's 16 PF 5 personality scale, Sherbourne and Stewart's social support scale, and Lazarus and Folkman's Ways of Coping Checklist. The present results confirm the previously reported deficit of social support perceived by subjects in this population. Concerning their personality, this population sample falls outside national norms in 7 dimensions: compared to the general population, the socially isolated individual appears essentially to be introverted and anxious, emotionally unstable, avoiding conflicts, timid and ill at ease in the company of -others, imaginative and distracted. To face up to their feeling of loneliness, they have a tendency to use coping styles such as "keep it to yourself" and "wishful thinking". On the other hand, they resort very little to social support. Among the pertinent variables, 5 predictive factors were recognized, and they could explain 51% of the variance in the feeling of loneliness: they include the global score of perceived social support, coping strategies focussed around wishful thinking, coping strategies that avoid resort to social support, personality traits of imaginativeness and absent-mindedness, and an introverted personality. Three predictors contributed independently to the model: absence of resort to social support, the use of wishful thinking, and the imaginative-distracted personality trait. We likewise found evidence for a mediator role of the absence of resort to social support in the relation between the levels of perceived social support and the feeling of loneliness. Thus it is not so much the deficit in the subject's social relations that determines his feeling of loneliness as it is his difficulty of appealing to others when in distress. These results suggest that it would be judicious to develop specific therapeutic interventions for this type of person that would permit them to adjust more actively and to behave more realistically.