Julianne Holt-Lunstad

Who they are

Holt-Lunstad works at Brigham Young University on social relationships and health. Her 2010 meta-analysis is where this subject acquired its authority, and her 2015 follow-up asked the harder question of which component does the work.

She is one of the more useful researchers to cite, because her own later work complicates her earlier work in print.

Key papers

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., & Layton, J. B. (2010). Social relationships and mortality risk: a meta-analytic review. PLoS Medicine, 7(7), e1000316.

Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227-237.

Key ideas

Across 148 studies and 308,849 participants, stronger social relationships were associated with a fifty per cent higher likelihood of survival, consistent across age, sex, initial health, cause of death and follow-up length.

The association was strongest for complex measures of social integration and lowest for binary indicators of residential status.

In the 2015 analysis, controlling for confounds, social isolation came out at twenty-nine per cent increased likelihood of mortality, loneliness at twenty-six and living alone at thirty-two, with no differences between objective and subjective measures.

Concepts on this site

Loneliness and Mortality

Digital Loneliness

Weak Ties

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