Perspectives on interpersonal touch are related to subjective sleep quality.

Affective touch has been reported for its calming effects; however, it is less clear whether touch is associated with sleep. Here, the relationship between different touch variables and self-reported sleep indicators was investigated. Data were extracted from the Touch Test, a cross-sectional survey conducted in 2020. Data from a sample of 15,049 healthy adults from the UK (mean age = 56.13, SD = 13.8; 75.4% female) were analysed. Participants were asked to attribute positive, negative, or no effects on sleep to hugs, strokes, massages, intimate touch, and sleep onset with and without touch. The time since last intentional touch, touch amount satisfaction, and childhood bed routine with hugs and kisses were assessed. Sleep quality, duration, latency, wake after sleep onset and diurnal preference were measured. Data were analysed using chi-square tests and logistic regressions. Affective touch before sleep was perceived to have positive effects on sleep. Touch recency emerged as a significant predictor for some sleep variables, with a longer timespan since the last intentional touch relating to improved sleep quality, longer sleep duration, and shorter and fewer instances of waking up after sleep onset in some participants. Experiencing too much touch was related to lower sleep quality and higher instances of waking up after sleep onset. These findings highlight the importance of interpersonal touch for subjective sleep quality.

Exploring the demographic and situational characteristics of older British people experiencing loneliness as positive within the BBC loneliness experiment.

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to increase the understanding of loneliness experienced as positive, by exploring the demographic and situational characteristics of older people who experience loneliness as positive. METHOD: Two binary logistic regressions were conducted using data from those aged 60+ from the BBC Loneliness Experiment (N = 5250). RESULTS: The first binary logistic regression compared participants who experience loneliness always as positive (N = 219) to those participants who never experience loneliness as positive (N = 3004). Spending time alone did not emerge as relevant to experiencing loneliness as positive, but enjoying time alone was important (OR = 1.561 (95% CI = 1.313 - 1.856)). The lonelier older people were, the less likely they experienced loneliness as positive (OR = 0.708 (95% CI =0.644 - 0.779)). Men were more likely to experience loneliness as positive compared to women (OR = 1.734 (95% CI = 1.269 - 2.370)). Lastly, the experience of loneliness as positive was likely to decrease when older people had more years of education (OR = 0.887 (95% CI = 0.853 - 0.921)) but increased with age (OR = 1.067 (95% CI = 1.037 - 1.098)). The results of the second binary logistic regression comparing participants who indicated loneliness purely as positive with those participants indicate to experience loneliness sometimes as positive (N = 2027), are in line with the first regression analyses. CONCLUSION: The results are critically discussed by emphasizing the role of norms and cultures, gerotranscendence, and severity of loneliness, which might influence the experiences of loneliness. Further qualitative research is needed to elucidate the meanings of these positive experiences of loneliness.

Exploring the nature and variation of the stigma associated with loneliness.

The current study uses data from The British Broadcasting Corporation Loneliness Experiment to explore the social stigma of loneliness and how it varies by gender, age and cultural individualism. We examined stigmatizing judgements of people who are lonely (impressions of those who feel lonely and attributions for loneliness), perceived stigma in the community and self-stigma (shame for being lonely and inclination to conceal loneliness), while controlling for participants' own feelings of loneliness. The scores on most measures fell near the mid-point of the scales, but stigmatizing perceptions depended on the measure of stigmatization that was used and on age, gender and country-level individualism. Multilevel analyses revealed that men had more stigmatizing perceptions, more perceived community stigma, but less self-stigma than women; young people had higher scores than older people on all indicators except for internal versus external attributions and people living in collectivist countries perceived loneliness as more controllable and perceived more stigma in the community than people living in individualistic countries. Finally, young men living in individualistic countries made the most internal (vs. external) attributions for loneliness. We discuss the implications of these findings for understandings of loneliness stigma and interventions to address loneliness.

Loneliness around the world: Age, gender, and cultural differences in loneliness.

The BBC Loneliness Experiment provided a unique opportunity to examine differences in the experience of lonelines across cultures, age, and gender, and the interaction between these factors. Using those data, we analysed the frequency of loneliness reported by 46,054 participants aged 16-99 years, living across 237 countries, islands, and territories, representing the full range of individualism-collectivism cultures, as defined by Hofstede (1997). Findings showed that loneliness increased with individualism, decreased with age, and was greater in men than in women. We also found that age, gender, and culture interacted to predict loneliness, although those interactions did not qualify the main effects, and simply accentuated them. We found the most vulnerable to loneliness were younger men living in individualistic cultures.

Attitudes to Interpersonal Touch in the Workplace in Autistic and non-Autistic Groups.

Unemployment and underemployment have consistently been shown to be higher in autistic adults relative to non-autistic adults. This may be due, in part, to a lack of workplace accommodations being made for autistic people. One factor that may contribute to employment inequalities in autistic people is differences in attitudes towards interpersonal touch. This study acts as a preliminary investigation into whether employed autistic and non-autistic participants differ in their attitudes towards touch in the workplace, and in their loneliness and wellbeing. The current dataset was drawn from a larger online survey (the Touch Test) designed to explore attitudes and experiences towards touch. We found that employed autistic participants had more negative attitudes to general, social and workplace touch relative to non-autistic participants. Autistic participants also experienced greater loneliness and reduced wellbeing. Attachment-related anxiety was the only significant predictor of wellbeing in employed autistic adults. However, attachment-related anxiety, general attitudes to touch and the role of touch in the workplace predicted wellbeing in employed non-autistic adults. With regards to loneliness, general attitudes to touch and the role of touch in the workplace predicted loneliness in autistic participants. We also replicated the finding that a greater proportion of autistic participants were unemployed relative to non-autistic participants. Collectively, this research highlights the importance of considering touch in research investigating employment, and its impact on loneliness and wellbeing, in autistic participants.

Older adults' experiences of loneliness over the lifecourse: An exploratory study using the BBC loneliness experiment.

PURPOSE: To explore older adults' experiences of loneliness across the lifecourse and the relationship with current loneliness. METHODS: Our sample is 6,708 people aged 65 years and older, resident in the UK, who participated in the BBC Loneliness Experiment in spring 2018. Loneliness was assessed using the 3 item UCLA Loneliness Scale, using a threshold score of 6+ to define loneliness. Participants were asked if they had experienced loneliness in 5 life-stages ranging from childhood to old age and, if so, at which stage had they experienced loneliness most intensely. Multivariate logistic regression analysis was used to estimate the odds ratios of experiencing loneliness in relation to previous experiences of loneliness and key covariates. FINDINGS: 41% of participants reported current feelings of loneliness and were more likely than those who did not to spend time alone, have poorer self-rated health, be unmarried, have fewer financial resources, and lower levels of neighbourhood trust. 71% reported they had experienced loneliness at some previous stage in their life, with 26% experiencing it in childhood (5-15 years and 39% as a young adult (16-24 years). Having had three or more prior life stage experiences of loneliness was an independent risk factor for current loneliness. CONCLUSION: We highlight the potential importance of examining older adults' experience of loneliness within a lifecourse perspective. We suggest a research agenda that examines the importance of the number and timing of previous loneliness experiences and investigates the strategies used to cope with loneliness across the lifecourse as a pathway to developing more effective and personalised loneliness interventions.

Assessing individual differences in attitudes towards touch in treatment settings: Introducing the touch & health scale.

Individuals commonly receive touch in treatment settings, but there is limited research on how they perceive it. The current project sought to address this gap by: 1) developing the Touch & Health Scale (THS) - a novel instrument to measure attitudes to touch in treatment settings 2) assessing inter-individual differences in THS scores, and 3) examining the association between individuals' THS scores and wellbeing. Data of a large U.K. adults sample (N > 12,000) were used. THS showed Cronbach's α between 0.636 and 0.816 and significant correlations (p < 0.001) with day-to-day attitudes to touch. THS scores differed as a function of extraversion and avoidant attachment style. Participants with more positive attitudes to touch in treatment settings showed greater wellbeing. Overall, the study highlights the importance of a personalised approach to touch in treatment settings and provides a new scale that may act as a screening tool for this purpose.

Choking under pressure: Does it get easier with age? How loneliness affects social monitoring across the life span.

Previous experimental work showed that young adults reporting loneliness performed less well on emotion recognition tasks (Diagnostic Analysis of Nonverbal Accuracy [DANVA-2]) if they were framed as indicators of social aptitude, but not when the same tasks were framed as indexing academic aptitude. Such findings suggested that undergraduates reporting loneliness possessed the social monitoring skills necessary to read the emotions underlying others' facial expressions, but that they choked under social pressure. It has also been found that undergraduates reporting loneliness have better recall for both positive and negative social information than their non-lonely counterparts. Whether those effects are evident across different age groups has not been examined. Using data from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Loneliness Experiment that included participants aged 16-99 years (N = 54,060), we (i) test for replication in a larger worldwide sample and (ii) extend those linear model analyses to other age groups. We found only effects for participants aged 25-34 years: In this age group, loneliness was associated with increased recall of negative individual information, and with choking under social pressure during the emotion recognition task; those effects were small. We did not find any such effects among participants in other age groups. Our findings suggest that different cognitive processes may be associated with loneliness in different age groups, highlighting the importance of life-course approaches in this area.

Exploring the Frequency, Intensity, and Duration of Loneliness: A Latent Class Analysis of Data from the BBC Loneliness Experiment.

Almost all measures of loneliness have been developed without discussing how to best conceptualize and assess the severity of loneliness. In the current study, we adapted the four-item UCLA, so that it continued to measure frequency of loneliness, but also assessed intensity and duration, providing a measure of other aspects of loneliness severity. Using data from participants resident in the UK who completed the BBC Loneliness Experiment (N = 36,767; F = 69.6%) and Latent Class Profile Analyses, we identified four groups of people who scored high on loneliness on at least one of the three severity measures. Duration of loneliness often over months or years seemed to be particularly important in distinguishing groups. Further, group membership was predicted by important demographic and psychological variables. We discuss the findings in terms of implications for research and practice. We highlight the need to explore these profiles longitudinally to investigate how membership predicts later mental and physical health, and well-being.