An interview
We recently talked with Susanne Bücker, whose article titled, “Loneliness and the Big Five personality traits: A meta‐analysis”, recently appeared in the January/February 2020 issue of EJP. Susanne is a PhD candidate at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Read on to learn more about Susanne’s work on loneliness and personality!
Q: Hi Susanne! Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you became interested in personality psychology?
During my first semesters as psychology undergraduate at Trier University (Germany), I got curious about what makes people the way they are and why people differ. At that time, however, I did not realize that these were questions that personality psychology could answer. Later, I joined Maike Luhmanns lab for psychological methods at Ruhr University Bochum as a PhD student. My research in Bochum focusses on loneliness across the adult life span. I am particularly interested in the interplay of personality traits, environmental factors - such as major life events - and social relationships (or the lack thereof). Recently, I became interested in questions like “Although transient for some individuals, why does loneliness become chronic for others?” or “Do life events trigger feelings of loneliness, and if so, which characteristics of an event play a role?”.
At the beginning of my PhD, I probably wouldn't have called myself a personality psychologist - simply because I didn't know exactly what it meant to be a personality psychologist. During the first year of my PhD, I got the chance to take part in the 1st Inaugural Summer School of Personality Science. I was incredibly fascinated by what personality psychology is all about. I found out that it is both interesting and important to examine a construct like loneliness from a personality psychological perspective. I have also learned that personality psychologists seem to be a group of people who are ambitious, open-minded, inspiring, rigorous, and very enjoyable. Consequently, I of course wanted to be part of this group.
Q: What aspect of your job do you enjoy most?
There are quite a few things I enjoy about my job. I love that in my job I can spend my time on the things that really interest me. Research just never gets boring and I feel like I learned something new every week. I appreciate these intellectually challenging and stimulating aspects of my work.
I also enjoy the fact that I can travel a lot in my job. Attending conferences always means that you can catch up with good friends and that's just great. Moreover, I am excited about the general ambitions of the field to improve psychological science in terms of transparency and reproducibility. During the first year of my PhD, I was introduced to a community that pre-registers their studies, uploads their data and code, and tries to make science as robust as possible. In my opinion, this is clearly the way to go! For the meta-analysis, about which I will talk more later, I have learned a lot from other scientists who take open science seriously. I am therefore very happy that my meta-analysis is pre-registered and that both data and code are available via the Open Science Framework.
Q: Can you tell us about the study?
I conducted this meta-analysis together with Marlies Maes (KU Leuven, Belgium), Jaap Denissen (Tilburg University, the Netherlands), and Maike Luhmann (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany). We investigated the relations of loneliness with the Big Five personality traits. Most people think of old age, the loss of a partner, or low socioeconomic status when it comes to risk factors for loneliness. In this study we show that personality traits also seem to be relevant.
Loneliness is described as the subjective perception of a discrepancy between the desired and the actual social relationships in terms of companionship, connectedness, or intimacy. Despite a growing interest in interindividual differences in loneliness over the last years, surprisingly few studies have directly focused on the association between loneliness and broader personality traits. Fortunately, even studies that did not initially focus on the association between loneliness and personality often collected data on both constructs. The present meta-analysis taps into this underused source of data and provides the first comprehensive account of how loneliness and broader personality traits are related and how robust these relations are across different types of samples, loneliness measures, and other factors.
To compute meta-analytic bivariate correlations between loneliness and personality, we used robust variance estimation, which accounts for the dependency of effect sizes. Additionally, we used meta-analytic structural equation modelling to investigate the unique association between each personality trait and loneliness while controlling for the other four personality traits. In both bivariate and multivariate models, the strongest associations were found with extraversion (negative association) and neuroticism (positive association). To a lesser extent, agreeableness and conscientiousness were negatively related to loneliness. Openness did not seem to play an important role in the context of loneliness.
There are ongoing discussions if and to what extent loneliness should be conceptualized as a trait-like characteristic with similar features (i.e., similar heritability, stability, and change across the lifespan) as broader personality traits. In the present meta-analysis, we show how loneliness can be embedded in the Five-Factor Model (FFM) as a broader personality framework. In this way, this study provides the basis for a theoretical refinement of loneliness and enables comparisons of trait loneliness with other traits (e.g., psychopathology). Our study illustrates that the average lonely person is rather introverted and neurotic, and somewhat less agreeable and conscientious than the average non-lonely person. However, it should be noted that lonely people can be very different, and these differences are probably greater than the differences between lonely and not-lonely people.
Our results suggest that although broader personality traits and loneliness are interrelated, none of these relations is strong enough to speak of redundancy. Understanding how broader personality traits and loneliness are related is not only of interest from a theoretical perspective, but can also have practical implications, for example by informing prevention and intervention strategies against loneliness. Loneliness can occur across diagnostic boundaries. Neurotic tendencies to worry, for example that others might not like or could reject one, can maintain or increase loneliness. The knowledge of the associations between personality traits and loneliness can point out personality-typical behaviors related to loneliness such as introverted and emotionally unstable states that could be considered in therapeutic settings.
Q: How do you think could this study be of use for other (loneliness) researchers?
Loneliness researchers are often asked whether loneliness is not just a symptom of depression or whether need to belong and loneliness are more or less the same construct. This study assessed the nomological network that characterizes loneliness. Nomological network analyses help to make clear what a trait actually is and enable comparisons with other constructs. Using the results from this study, we can compare the nomological network of loneliness with nomological networks of other related traits, such as psychopathology and need to below. The findings from this meta-analysis strengthen the assumption that loneliness, psychopathology, and need to belong are related but distinct constructs. From an FFM perspective, loneliness and psychopathology, for example, share a tendency for being emotionally unstable, worrying, experiencing more negative emotions, but also for being disorganized and somewhat careless. Loneliness and need to belong, interestingly, show similar relations (in terms of direction and effect size) with neuroticism. For agreeableness and extraversion, however, the associations for loneliness and need to belong are opposite. Whereas loneliness is related to a tendency to interact with others in a quiet, shy, and rather cold manner, need to belong is related to a tendency to interact with others in an outgoing and warm manner (Leary et al., 2013).
Moreover, there is no wide-scale consensus regarding the measurement of loneliness. In the present meta-analysis, we showed that the associations between loneliness and the personality traits differed meaningfully in strength depending on how loneliness was assessed. In line with the recent call for “a unified approach to loneliness” (Fried et al., 2020), I therefore argue that loneliness measures should be standardized to advance the understanding of loneliness by using an agreed common set of measures.
Q: What do you like to do in your spare time?
I like to be active in my leisure time. I teach yoga classes, play squash, love to go hiking, and try to motivate myself to go running from time to time. Other core components of my private life are my friends and my partner. It is important for me to have close contact with my long-time friends, whom I know from school. From my research on loneliness, I know that social relationships are as important for our health as healthy eating and regular exercise. I also enjoy cooking with my partner. We have an agreement that we will alternate once a week to prepare a new dish, which we have both never cooked before. This is becoming increasingly challenging, but I enjoy it very much.
Q: Do you have any tips or advice for young researchers in the field?
That's a tough one, because I myself am still a young researcher. First of all, I think it is important that you enjoy what you do. I also believe that it is important to build up a network of colleagues you like and who serve as role models. My role models in academia taught me that it is important to follow my instincts. If I believe that something is important research, that it will bring me further and that I enjoy it, then I should do it. Moreover, they taught me to say “no” every now and then, to take some time off, and to see my scientific career as a marathon rather than a sprint.
Another somewhat more practical advice would be to attend as many methods workshops and classes as possible. Diverse methodical knowledge allows one to answer new, creative, and complex questions. Sometimes it happened to me that I learned a new method and then thought "Wow, you could even examine xy with this approach". I have also benefited incredibly from teaching psychological methods and R to students because they ask questions you never thought about before.