An online survey of Australian adults found that those with less secure attachment orientations as adults were more likely to report feeling more lonely. They also found that certain types of motivations for loneliness mediated the association between insecure attachment and loneliness. The paper was published in. Journal of social and personal relationships.
Loneliness is a painful feeling that occurs when a person believes that their social relationships are fewer, weaker, or less satisfying than they would like. It is not the same as being physically alone, as a person can enjoy solitude without feeling lonely. Even when people are surrounded by others, they can feel lonely if they lack a sense of closeness, understanding, and belonging.
Loneliness can be temporary, such as after moving to a new city, ending a relationship, or losing contact with friends. It can also become chronic if the feelings last for a long time and begin to affect your daily life. Loneliness can include emotional loneliness, when you don’t have people close to you, and social loneliness, when you feel disconnected from your wider group or community. It can contribute to sadness, anxiety, low self-esteem, sleep problems, and decreased motivation. Persistent feelings of loneliness can also lead to poor physical health, as stress increases and healthy behaviors can decrease.
Study author Samantha O’Brien and colleagues investigated how individuals’ anxious and avoidant attachment orientations relate to their motivation for loneliness and, in turn, predict loneliness. Motives for loneliness refer to the reasons why a person chooses to spend time alone, or why they end up spending time alone. It may or may not be self-determined.
Self-determined motivation for solitude refers to choosing to spend time alone because it is personally pleasurable, meaningful, calming, or conducive to introspection and creativity. Non-self-determined motivations for loneliness refer to being lonely due to external pressures, rejection from others, anxiety, avoidance, or the feeling that there really is no other choice.
Study participants were 548 Australian adults recruited from the general community via social media and a student target pool. Before the final analysis, 72 of them were excluded because they failed the attention check. Of the remaining participants, 352 were university students. 73% of participants were female and 59% were under 30 years of age.
Participants completed an online survey that included assessments of adult attachment orientation (Measure of Experience in Close Relationships – Short Form) and Motivation for Loneliness (Measure of Motivation for Loneliness – Short Form). One week later, they completed a follow-up survey measuring their feelings of loneliness (UCLA’s 3-item Loneliness Scale).
Attachment orientation is a typical pattern of a person’s emotions and behavior in intimate relationships. People with marked attachment anxiety tend to be very afraid of rejection or abandonment, while marked attachment avoidance involves feeling uncomfortable with intimacy, dependence, or emotional intimacy. Significant attachment avoidance or anxiety is collectively referred to as insecure attachment, while secure attachment refers to low scores on both the Attachment Avoidance and Attachment Anxiety scales.
Results showed that individuals with a less secure attachment orientation (i.e., with significant attachment anxiety or avoidance) tended to report higher motivation for self-determined solitude. They also tended to report higher feelings of loneliness. Interestingly, in the initial simple correlations, self-determined loneliness motives were not directly related to either loneliness or attachment orientation. However, it was weakly associated with self-determined solitude motives.
The study authors tested a statistical model in which the two attachment orientations influenced both motivations for loneliness, which in turn influenced loneliness. Analyzes showed that both attachment orientations were likely to increase motivation for non-self-determined solitude, resulting in increased feelings of loneliness. In other words, involuntary loneliness serves as a medium to explain why anxiously attached people feel lonely.
On the other hand, the statistical model showed that avoidant orientation self-determinedly increases motivation for solitude, which in turn decreases feelings of loneliness. However, this association was relatively weak and far from statistically significant. Self-defined loneliness also did not mediate the relationship between anxious attachment and loneliness. Additionally, there was a direct association between attachment orientation and loneliness, which was not achieved by these two motivations for loneliness.
“These findings highlight that higher motivation for non-self-determined loneliness may be an important mechanism linking anxiety and avoidant attachment orientations to loneliness. Furthermore, self-determined loneliness appears to play an important role in reducing feelings of loneliness,” the study authors concluded.
This study contributes to the scientific understanding of the association between attachment orientation and loneliness. However, note that the study design does not allow us to draw definitive causal inferences from the results. Furthermore, the association between self-determined loneliness and either loneliness or attachment orientation is not present when these factors are examined separately by zero-order correlations, but is revealed to be significant only when modeled together.
The paper, “Attachment Orientations Predicting Loneliness: The Role of Self-Determined and Non-Self-Determined Loneliness,” was authored by Samantha G. O’Brien, Daniel J. Brown, Ashley B. Bryant, Hugh A. Hampton, Daniel J. Phipps, and Jacob J. Keach.
