Why do you keep feeling lonely? Examining reasons for chronic loneliness across cultures
Loneliness is a common human experience but it also predicts impaired health. While research currently aims to counteract any type of loneliness, we need to better understand and ease the loneliness that people do not manage to recover from themselves.
This requires examining risk factors in a person’s past (e.g., negative family relationships), personal tendencies resulting from such experiences, and contextual characteristics preventing that a person escapes loneliness (e.g., cultural norms not to show emotions). Risk factors will be studied in different cultures, to examine cross-cultural generalizability and counteract the strong focus on western contexts in the current research literature.