ArticleJournal of personality2019
Associations between loneliness and personality are mostly driven by a genetic association with Neuroticism.
Article in Journal of personality, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 51 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
51 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Loneliness and depression: bidirectional mendelian randomization analyses using data from three large genome-wide association studies.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Pooled it
- Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analysis of 133 traits.Nature human behaviour · 2023Pooled it
- The Stability and Change of Loneliness Across the Life Span: A Meta-Analysis of Longitudinal Studies.Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2020Pooled it
- Loneliness and Personality: Noise- and Bias-Free True Correlations Between Loneliness and the Big Five Personality Domains.Journal of personality · 2026Article
- Loneliness as a Pathway Linking Hearing Decline to Cognitive Aging: Longitudinal and Genetic Evidence.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- The relationship between core self-evaluation and cognitive failures among Chinese college students: a moderated mediation model.BMC public health · 2026Article
- All the Lonely People: An Integrated Review and Research Agenda on Work and Loneliness.Journal of management · 2026Review
- Multidimensional Loneliness Among University Students: A Latent Profile Approach.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Animal Video Lovers Always Have Company: The Role of Cyber-Mediated Animal Attachment in Loneliness.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Personality traits and loneliness: An ecological momentary assessment study with self and partner ratings.Journal of research in personality · 2025Article
- Associations of temperament, family functioning with loneliness trajectories in patients with breast cancer: a longitudinal observational study.BMC psychology · 2025Observational
- Neuroticism, loneliness, all-cause and cause-specific mortality: A 17-year study of nearly 500,000 individuals.Journal of affective disorders · 2025Article
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- Chronic loneliness and the risk of incident stroke in middle and late adulthood: a longitudinal cohort study of U.S. older adults.EClinicalMedicine · 2024Article
- Understanding the Development of Chronic Loneliness in Youth.Child development perspectives · 2024Article
- Factors associated with loneliness in Latin-American family care partners during the COVID-19 pandemic.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Article
- Connecting loneliness with pathological personality traits: Evidence for genetic and environmental mediation from a study of older twins.Personality disorders · 2024Article
- Contributions of loneliness to cognitive impairment and dementia in older adults are independent of other risk factors and Alzheimer's pathology: a narrative review.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2024Review
- Investigating the interplay of loneliness, computer-mediated communication, online social capital, and well-being: insights from a COVID-19 lockdown study.Frontiers in digital health · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
Abstract
objectiveLoneliness is an aversive response to a discrepancy between desired and actual social relationships and correlates with personality. We investigate the relationship of loneliness and personality in twin family and molecular genetic data.
methodPhenotypic correlations between loneliness and the Big Five personality traits were estimated in 29,625 adults, and in a group with genome-wide genotype data (N = 4,222), genetic correlations were obtained. We explored whether genetic correlations may reflect causal relationships by investigating within monozygotic twin pair differences (N
resultsThe strongest correlations with loneliness were observed for Neuroticism (r = .55) and Extraversion (r = -.33). Only Neuroticism showed a high correlation with loneliness independent of other personality traits (r = .50), so follow-up analyses focused on Neuroticism. The genetic correlation between loneliness and Neuroticism from genotyped variants was .71; a significant reciprocal causal relationship and nonsignificant cross-trait assortative mating imply that this is at least partly due to mediated pleiotropy.
conclusionsWe show that the relationship between loneliness and personality is largely explained by its relationship with Neuroticism, which is substantially genetic in nature.
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