Social Isolation

Social Isolation

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

A countable fact about a person's week: how much contact, how many roles, whether anybody would notice a change. Objective by construction, which is what separates it from loneliness.

What it is

Isolation is measured by contact with family and friends and by participation in groups and organisations. Loneliness is measured by asking how a person feels about that. The two correlate and are not the same thing.

Which of them carries the mortality risk is genuinely disputed, and this page records the dispute instead of resolving it.

In effect

Steptoe, Shankar, Demakakos and Wardle followed 6,500 adults aged fifty-two and over for around seven years. After adjusting for demographics and baseline health, isolation remained significantly associated with mortality and loneliness did not, and adding loneliness to the model left the isolation association unchanged.

Holt-Lunstad and colleagues, pooling studies the following year, found social isolation, loneliness and living alone predicting mortality at comparable size, and reported no difference between objective and subjective measures.

What it does not say

It does not say loneliness is harmless. The larger synthesis puts it almost level with isolation, and the cohort's own authors state that both impair quality of life and wellbeing.

It does not support a causal claim either. No intervention study has shown that reducing isolation prevents any of these outcomes, which is the limit on all practical advice in this area.

Sources

  1. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000316
  2. Steptoe, A., Shankar, A., Demakakos, P., & Wardle, J. (2013). PNAS, 110(15), 5797-5801. doi:10.1073/pnas.1219686110
  3. Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227-237. doi:10.1177/1745691614568352
  4. Where this came from
  5. No book in this library is the source of this concept. It entered the vault from Which Is Worse, Being Alone or Feeling Lonely, built from primary sources rather than from a book.