Toward a Social Psychology of Loneliness

Loneliness is a common experience probably few people avoid being lonely at some time in their life. It is also a distressing experience as many individual accounts bear out. For example, in interviews with journalist Suzanne Gordon (1976) one retired surgeon commented on the loneliness of old age, that, "You are alone, people have died and you look in the mirror and you look awful . . ."; while a middle-aged woman describing her unhappy marriage noted that "There was no one to talk to . . . To me, loneliness and depression were absolutely synonymous". Yet, despite the pervasiveness and importance of the phenomenon, it is only recently that social scientists have attempted a suitably empirical, theoretically-derived study of loneliness (e.g. see Hartog et at., 1980; Peplau and Perlman, in press). The intention of the present chapter is to review the literature, drawing mainly on current empirical research, and to provide a conceptual perspective on loneliness. We start, therefore, by considering a more formal definition of the concept; in our view loneliness is the unpleasant experience that occurs when a person's network of social relations is deficient in some important way, either quantitatively or qualitatively; and although 3 1 32 DANIEL PERLMAN AND LETITIA ANNE PEPLAU