ReviewAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences2025
Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.
Review in Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Friendship: a phenomenological exploration of the lived experience of youth and of peer support workers in Youth FACT (flexible assertive community treatment) services.International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being · 2026Article
- Cynicism among friends accuracy and bias in cynicism judgments.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2026Article
- Homophily in friendship choice during an early life transition: A cohort network dynamic approach.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2026Article
- Association of family and friend relationship satisfaction with incident dementia: A prospective cohort study of 104,093 participants.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Article
- Why friendship and loneliness affect our health.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Humans, like all monkeys and apes, have an intense desire to be social. The human social world, however, is extraordinarily complex, depends on sophisticated cognitive and neural processing, and is easily destabilized, with dramatic consequences for our mental and physical health. To show why, I first summarize descriptive aspects of human friendships and what they do for us, then discuss the cognitive and neurobiological processes that underpin them. I then summarize the growing body of evidence suggesting that our mental as well as our physical health and wellbeing are best predicted by the number and quality of close friend/family relationships we have, with five being the optimal number. Finally, I review neurobiological evidence that both number of friends and loneliness itself are correlated with the volume of certain key brain regions associated with the default mode neural network and its associated gray-matter processing units.
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What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.