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Category: Project

Description: Loneliness and social isolation are increasingly recognized as global health concerns. Yet, little is known about how loneliness and social isolation are linked to health in non-Western contexts, and it is unclear how culture shapes these links. In this pre-registered study, we analyze five large-scale cross-cultural datasets to examine the associations between loneliness, living alone (an index of social isolation), and a range of mental and physical health outcomes in over 350,000 individuals across 58 countries spanning six continents. We find that loneliness is significantly linked to worse mental and physical health outcomes across all countries (|rpooled| = .123 - .492), whereas living alone is weakly or not at all associated with health (|rpooled| = <.001 - .084). Across health outcomes, loneliness predicted poorer health (in any direction) 35 times stronger than living alone. Critically, these links are moderated by country-level collectivism and relational mobility: In more collectivistic societies, loneliness is less strongly linked to worse mental and physical health, and living alone is weakly linked to some metrics of better mental health. In more relationally mobile societies, loneliness is more strongly linked to depression and anxiety, and living alone weakly predicts better mental health. Results further demonstrate that living alone weakly predicts loneliness globally (rpooled = .157), and that this relationship is even weaker in more collectivistic societies. Together, these findings underscore the contextual nature of the relationships between loneliness, living alone, and health across cultures and emphasize the importance of considering culture when developing initiatives to address loneliness and social isolation.