Press release: "Loneliness and the Big Five personality traits: A meta-analysis"
Susanne Buecker and her colleagues have recently published the article, “Loneliness and the Big Five personality traits: A meta-analysis” in the European Journal of Personality. In their research, they summarized the scientific literature focused on loneliness and the Big Five personality traits using a meta-analysis. Their findings suggest that people’s loneliness levels may be partially due to stable personality factors. The study was published in the January/February issue of the European Journal of Personality.
To investigate whether people’s loneliness levels are related to their personalities, Susanne Buecker and her colleagues searched for studies that included data on both loneliness and the Big Five personality traits. Their search resulted in a total of 113 studies being included in the meta-analysis, with an overall sample of 93,668 individuals and 1,697 effect sizes. The researchers then performed meta-analytic structural equation modelling, which allowed them to investigate the unique association between each personality trait and loneliness controlling for the other four personality traits. Their results show that extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness explained some of the variance in loneliness, but that (low) extraversion and (high) neuroticism played the largest role in the context of loneliness.
About these findings, Ms. Buecker said in a recent interview with EJP: “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.”
Correspondence about this study may be addressed to the first author, Susanne Buecker, Psychological Methods lab, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. Susanne Buecker can be contacted via email on susanne.buecker@rub.de.
A complete interview with Susanne Buecker can be found at https://www.ejp-blog.com/blog/2020/2/21/a-conversation-with-susanne-buecker.