The study forms part of the CHANSE-funded TIMED project, which explored digitalisation and time perception across Europe. Between December 2022 and May 2023, six national teams each conducted 50 interviews lasting on average 51 minutes, in person, by telephone or online. Participants ranged from 18 to 91 years old and included students, retirees, unemployed people and workers from diverse sectors. Crucially, the interview schedule did not ask directly about pandemic digital experiences; instead, participants spontaneously brought up COVID-19 in 148 of the 300 interviews. The researchers argue that this unprompted quality is valuable, because what people volunteer about the past signals which experiences were novel, meaningful or emotionally charged enough to be encoded and recalled years later.

The theoretical backbone of the analysis is Self-Determination Theory, the influential framework developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, which holds that well-being depends on the fulfilment of three needs. Autonomy is the sense of acting from one’s own volition rather than under external control. Competence is the feeling of mastery and effectiveness. Relatedness is the need to feel connected and to belong. Because the pandemic collapsed work, family, leisure and social life into a single domestic space, as communication scholar Christian Fuchs put it, activities usually performed in different roles at different times and places converged into one unstructured home-bound space-time, threatening all three needs simultaneously. Digital technology was the obvious candidate to compensate, but whether it did so proved deeply conditional.

The first major theme the researchers labelled conditional autonomy. For some participants, particularly those with abundant free time after furlough or reduced outdoor options, digital entertainment and app-supported exercise helped them fill and shape their days meaningfully. One British probation officer described how a paid fitness app with hundreds of exercise videos became vital for maintaining routines during lockdown. Remote work also offered temporal flexibility, allowing people to choose when to work rather than adhering to fixed office hours, but this benefit clustered among those who already had time to spare. For time-poor participants with caregiving responsibilities, teleworking often blurred the boundary between work and family, pushing paid labour into evenings and nights. A Czech union expert described working from home with a small child as hell, mentally and physically exhausting, and criticised the individualistic assumption that work-life balance could simply be achieved through personal effort.

Space mattered as much as time. Participants who had private rooms and adequate equipment recalled remote work as comfortable and even empowering, with some interpreting their employer’s sudden acceptance of home offices as a sign of trust. Others, sharing cramped quarters or a single computer, found digitalisation an obstacle rather than a liberation. A Spanish psychologist recalled clients unable to speak freely in therapy sessions for fear of being overheard by family members. Some participants also reframed home working sceptically, viewing it as a means for organisations to cut operating costs or extract higher productivity, with one noting that employees grew accustomed to five Zoom meetings a day, a pace that became an implicit standard even after hybrid working returned. Autonomy, in these accounts, was not a property of the technology but an outcome of its interaction with living space, equipment, caregiving loads and organisational power.

Competence showed the same conditional pattern. On one side, participants remembered struggling to keep pace with digital demands: parents overwhelmed by their children’s school platforms, students unable to concentrate through four-hour stretches of video lessons, employees frustrated by flawed public digital infrastructure. One retired Spanish accountant recounted how a faulty QR code system at the state employment service ultimately cost her financial aid, an experience she attributed not to personal failing but to her country’s inadequate digital infrastructure. On the other side, some recalled growing through digital accomplishments, such as a British camera operator whose industry rigged remote-controlled camera heads so film crews could work safely, or workers whose productivity rose once commuting disappeared. The researchers found that competence frustration typically arose when digital demands exceeded existing personal, social or cognitive capabilities, particularly where organisations failed to provide support, realistic expectations or adequate infrastructure.

Relatedness produced perhaps the most emotionally resonant findings. Digital tools were remembered as a lifeline, in the words of one British participant, preserving birthdays, festivities and daily contact when physical gatherings were impossible. Hospitals bought tablets so patients could stay in touch with loved ones, and video calling, once an exotic exception reserved for friends abroad, became an ordinary part of private life. New forms of participation also emerged: group chats that had never existed before, Facebook communities offering companionship, and late-night livestreamed concerts where viewers typed into chats in real time. One kitchen porter described watching her favourite metal bands perform at one in the morning, broadcast from American living rooms, as amazing precisely because the chat allowed genuine interaction despite isolation.

Yet the same memories carried an undercurrent of loss. Participants repeatedly described digitally mediated contact as functional but insufficient, lacking the intimacy, spontaneity and embodied presence of face-to-face encounters. Some reported emotional fatigue and deliberately limited their screen time; others noticed friendships fading when they existed only through Messenger or Teams. In professional and educational settings, the option to switch cameras off fostered anonymity and diffused responsibility, making relationships transactional. A Czech IT worker observed that in hybrid meetings the people in the room talked while those connected online, 98 per cent of them, stayed silent, and that casual kitchen and canteen small talk, along with verbal skills, was eroding. Once restrictions lifted, many participants deliberately retreated from digital social spaces, confirming that technology had been a necessary substitute rather than a preferred mode of connection.

The authors argue that these findings move beyond the vague conclusion that technology has mixed effects, echoing Melvin Kranzberg’s first law that technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral. By identifying the specific socio-material conditions, time availability, spatial arrangements, infrastructural adequacy, organisational power relations and caregiving responsibilities, that determined whether digital tools supported or frustrated need satisfaction, the study offers a framework for anticipating how digital life might shape well-being in future crises. The researchers caution that their convenience sample, skewed toward university-educated participants, cannot represent entire populations, and that memories are reconstructive rather than verbatim records. Even so, they conclude that digital well-being should be treated not merely as a matter of individual self-discipline but as a structural and collective issue, demanding equitable infrastructure, realistic organisational expectations and need-supportive digital policies, both during health emergencies and in ordinary digital life beyond them.

Subject of Research: Retrospective accounts of how digital technology use during the COVID-19 pandemic affected satisfaction of the basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Article Title: Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Witowska, J., Goncikowska, K., Schoetensack, C., & Černohorská, V. (2026). Connected and confined: memories of digital experiences in relation to autonomy, competence, and relatedness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Current Psychology, 45(18), Article 1514. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-09895-9

Keywords: digital technology, COVID-19 pandemic, autobiographical memory, self-determination theory, autonomy, competence, relatedness, remote work, cyberpsychology, digital well-being, thematic analysis, social connection

The research team, led by Dokyung Yoon with Elizabeth Zelinski and Teal Eich, took a deliberately different approach from most previous work in the field. Rather than treating each aspect of social life as a separate variable and asking how it correlates with health outcomes, they used a person-centered method known as latent profile analysis. This statistical technique searches for hidden subgroups within a population, groups of people who share a similar pattern across many measured characteristics at once. The logic is intuitive: two people with identical marital status may have utterly different social realities, and averaging across them can obscure the very configurations that matter for health. By modeling people rather than variables, the researchers could capture the full architecture of an individual’s social world in a single classification.

To build that architecture, the team drew on seven indicators spanning the two major dimensions that social scientists use to define connection. The structural dimension describes the observable scaffolding of a social life: whether someone is married or partnered, whether they live alone or with others, how frequently they contact children, other family members, and friends, and whether they participate in social activities. The functional dimension captures the subjective quality of that scaffolding: how much social support a person perceives themselves to have, and how lonely they report feeling. The distinction matters because the two dimensions can diverge dramatically. A person can be surrounded by relatives yet feel emotionally abandoned, or live entirely alone yet feel deeply supported by a few close ties. Structural measures alone miss the first case; functional measures alone miss the second.

The sample was drawn from the 2012 and 2014 waves of the Health and Retirement Study, a nationally representative longitudinal survey of Americans over fifty that has become the workhorse of aging research. The analysis focused on 10,145 community-dwelling adults aged sixty-five and older, with an average age of 74.48 years. From these participants, the latent profile analysis extracted five distinct profiles, each representing a characteristic constellation of the seven indicators. The largest group, accounting for forty percent of the sample, was married and moderately socially connected. A further twenty-seven percent were single but still moderately connected. Nine percent formed a group the researchers labeled most socially connected, combining partnership, frequent contact, participation, high perceived support, and low loneliness. Seven percent fell into the most socially disconnected profile, lacking both structural ties and functional support. And eighteen percent, nearly one in five older adults in the sample, occupied the profile that gave the study its most striking finding: married but socially disconnected.

This married and disconnected group is the study’s central surprise. Members of this profile had the structural marker most often equated with social protection, a spouse or partner, yet scored on the disconnected end of the functional spectrum, reporting elevated loneliness and weaker perceived support alongside limited contact with family, friends, and community activities. In earlier studies that relied on single indicators, these individuals would likely have been classified as socially embedded and aggregated into a protected category. The person-centered approach makes them visible, and their sheer size, nearly a fifth of the sample, suggests that a substantial population of older adults is being missed by screening approaches that ask only about marital status or living arrangements. The finding echoes a growing recognition in gerontology that loneliness and isolation are overlapping but non-identical conditions, and that neither can serve as a proxy for the other.

The researchers then asked what distinguished the profiles on a battery of sociodemographic, psychological, environmental, and health-related measures. Compared with the most socially connected group, members of every other profile were more likely to have less education and fewer economic resources. Psychological characteristics tracked connection as well: the less connected profiles showed greater neuroticism, more depressive symptoms, and worse cognitive scores, while scoring lower on extraversion. Even the perceived character of the surrounding neighborhood differed, with less connected groups reporting lower neighborhood cohesion and, notably, lower neighborhood disorder. The pattern held across profiles in a graded fashion, with the most socially connected group anchored at the favorable end of nearly every comparison and the most socially disconnected at the unfavorable end.

The association with cognition deserves particular attention. Social disconnection has been repeatedly linked in prior research to faster cognitive decline and increased dementia risk, and the present study adds weight to that literature by showing that worse cognitive scores characterize not just the extremely isolated but also the moderately connected and the married-but-disconnected groups relative to the most connected. The cross-sectional design of the analysis means causality cannot be established; poor cognition may constrain social engagement just as disconnection may erode cognitive reserve. But the consistency of the gradient across five distinct profiles, each defined by a different blend of structural and functional indicators, strengthens the argument that the full pattern of someone’s social life, not any single component, is what relates to brain health in aging.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates why latent profile analysis is gaining traction in social gerontology. Variable-centered approaches, such as regression models that estimate the effect of loneliness or marital status on an outcome, implicitly assume that the same relationship holds for everyone. Person-centered approaches relax that assumption and ask whether the population contains qualitatively different types. The five-profile solution here replicated much of what earlier studies had found, which the authors note as a strength, while also surfacing a profile that those studies had missed. That combination, replication plus discovery, is exactly what one wants from a new analytical lens: it confirms the robust features of the landscape while revealing terrain that older maps rendered invisible.

The practical implications are considerable. Interventions targeting loneliness in older adults are proliferating, from social prescribing programs to one-to-one befriending services, but they are typically designed for people identified as isolated or lonely by simple criteria. A married older adult with infrequent contact outside the household and a pervasive sense of loneliness may never be flagged, yet the data suggest such people number in the millions when national samples are considered. Screening tools that capture both structural and functional dimensions, and that treat the two in combination rather than in isolation, would better match the actual heterogeneity of older adults’ social lives. The study also hints at where interventions might look beyond the individual: neighborhood cohesion and economic resources both differentiated the profiles, suggesting that community-level and material factors shape the social worlds people can build.

What emerges from this research is a picture of social connection in later life as genuinely heterogeneous, structured into recognizable types rather than spread along a single continuum from isolated to connected. Most older adults in the sample were neither fully connected nor fully disconnected but occupied intermediate positions, and the specific configuration mattered. The married and disconnected profile, in particular, challenges the field to stop treating a wedding ring as evidence of a social life. As populations age across the developed world, and as health systems grapple with the documented consequences of disconnection for depression, cognition, morbidity, and mortality, studies like this one provide the finer-grained map that both researchers and practitioners have been missing. The next step, which the authors’ framework makes possible, is to track these profiles over time and determine which configurations predict which health trajectories, and for whom.

Subject of Research: Latent social connection profiles and their health correlates in older adults

Article Title: Identification and characteristics of social connection latent profiles in older adults: Findings from the Health and Retirement Study

Article References: Yoon, D., Zelinski, E., & Eich, T. (2026). Identification and characteristics of social connection latent profiles in older adults: Findings from the Health and Retirement Study. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08404-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08404-8

Keywords: social connection, loneliness, social isolation, older adults, latent profile analysis, Health and Retirement Study, cognitive function, depressive symptoms, marriage, gerontology, social support, neighborhood cohesion

The study drew on the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort, one of Scandinavia’s largest population-based research resources. Between baseline examinations in the 1990s, 24,863 participants with a mean age of 57.7 years—60.9 percent of them women—completed a self-administered questionnaire covering twenty-five distinct measures of social connection. Rather than treating social life as a single fuzzy variable, the investigators organized these measures into three conceptual components. The quality component captured how relationships feel, including loneliness and the sense of solidarity with relatives, colleagues, a society or club, and the neighborhood. The functional component measured the support people receive, such as help in times of illness or practical assistance. The structural component counted the concrete architecture of social life: who lives with whom, how often people attend gatherings, and which leisure and cultural activities they take part in.

Incident cardiovascular disease was identified through Sweden’s comprehensive national registers, which link each resident’s unique identification number to hospital discharge and cause-of-death records. Over twenty-five years of follow-up, the researchers documented 5,825 new cases of cardiovascular disease. Using Cox proportional hazards models—a statistical framework that estimates how a given characteristic changes the rate of disease onset over time while adjusting for other factors—they calculated hazard ratios and 95 percent confidence intervals for each of the twenty-five social connection measures. The team also applied false discovery rate correction to account for the many comparisons performed, a safeguard against spurious findings that many earlier studies in this field have lacked.

The results paint a nuanced picture. Within the quality component, people who reported feeling lonely often had a 19 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease than those who never felt lonely, with a hazard ratio of 1.19. A weaker but similar signal emerged for solidarity with relatives: participants reporting no solidarity with family members had an 18 percent higher risk compared with those reporting very strong solidarity. Intriguingly, the quality of ties to colleagues, to a society or club, and to neighbors showed no association with cardiovascular outcomes at all. The benefits of connection, it seems, are not distributed evenly across every relationship in a person’s life; the emotional bonds within the family appear to carry particular weight for cardiovascular health.

The functional component, which asked whether people could count on practical or emotional support when needed, produced no significant associations with cardiovascular disease risk. This null result is itself informative. It suggests that the objective availability of help may matter less for the heart than the subjective experience of belonging—or its absence. Epidemiologists have long debated whether the health effects of social connection flow through stress physiology, health behaviors, or access to care, and the pattern seen here hints that the felt quality of relationships may be more consequential than their instrumental utility.

The structural measures delivered some of the study’s most striking findings. Regular attendance at the theatre or cinema was associated with a 13 percent lower risk of cardiovascular disease, with a hazard ratio of 0.87. Visits to art exhibitions conferred a modest 8 percent reduction, nightclub or dance hall attendance a 7 percent reduction, and family gatherings a 7 percent reduction. On the other side of the ledger, living alone was associated with a 16 percent higher risk. These associations held after adjustment for conventional risk factors, suggesting that the activities themselves—or the social worlds they represent—carry information about cardiovascular risk that standard clinical measures do not capture.

Perhaps the most clinically significant finding emerged when the researchers tested interactions between measures. The elevated risk associated with loneliness was not uniform across the population. Among participants who did not attend family gatherings, loneliness was linked to a 25 percent higher risk of cardiovascular disease, with a hazard ratio of 1.25 and a false discovery rate-adjusted interaction p-value of 0.015. In other words, lonely individuals who also lacked the routine, recurring contact that family gatherings provide formed a distinct high-risk group. This interaction suggests that the two factors are not simply additive; the absence of structured family contact appears to amplify the cardiovascular toll of loneliness, identifying a population that standard screening might otherwise overlook.

The biological plausibility of these associations rests on well-studied pathways. Chronic loneliness and social disconnection are known to activate the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system, sustaining elevated levels of cortisol and catecholamines that promote hypertension, insulin resistance, and inflammatory processes central to atherosclerosis. Social isolation is also consistently associated with poorer health behaviors—lower physical activity, less adherence to medication, higher rates of smoking and unhealthy eating—and with reduced likelihood of seeking timely medical care. Cultural activities such as theatre visits may operate through additional channels, including cognitive stimulation, positive affect, and stress reduction, mechanisms that have been explored in the growing literature on arts and health.

The study’s strengths are considerable. Its sheer scale—nearly 25,000 participants and almost 6,000 cardiovascular events over 25 years—provides statistical power that few studies of social connection can match. The use of national registers minimizes loss to follow-up and avoids the self-report bias that plagues outcome ascertainment. The simultaneous evaluation of twenty-five measures across three conceptual domains, combined with formal interaction testing and false discovery rate correction, addresses the fragmentation that has characterized earlier research, which typically examined isolation or loneliness in isolation from the broader architecture of social life. The population-based design of the Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort, with written informed consent from all participants and approval from the Ethical Committee at the Medical Faculty of Lund University, further strengthens the generalizability of the findings within comparable settings.

Certain limitations nonetheless warrant caution. The social connection measures were self-reported at a single baseline assessment, and social lives change over decades; some participants may have become lonelier or more isolated after enrollment. Residual confounding by socioeconomic position, mental health, or subclinical disease cannot be excluded, and the cohort, drawn from a Swedish urban population in the 1990s, may not translate directly to other cultural contexts where family structures and leisure patterns differ. The associations, while statistically robust, are modest in magnitude compared with established risk factors such as smoking or hypertension. Even so, the identification of lonely individuals who do not attend family gatherings as a high-risk group offers a concrete, testable target for prevention. If future trials confirm that strengthening family contact or reducing loneliness lowers cardiovascular risk, the humble family gathering may earn a place alongside diet and exercise in the cardiologist’s prescription—a reminder that the heart keeps score not only of what we eat, but of who we see.

Subject of Research: The association between multiple dimensions of social connection and long-term cardiovascular disease risk

Article Title: Social connections and risk of cardiovascular disease: a 25-year population-based cohort study

Article References: Du, Y., Hu, X., Lindström, M., Borné, Y., & Sonestedt, E. (2026). Social connections and risk of cardiovascular disease: a 25-year population-based cohort study. BMC Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-026-05230-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12916-026-05230-y

Keywords: cardiovascular disease, loneliness, social connection, cohort study, epidemiology, family gatherings, living alone, solidarity, cultural activities, Malmö Diet and Cancer cohort, hazard ratio, public health

The research team, led by Shiv Ayappa together with Divya Manikandan, Katharine Press Callahan, Travis N. Rieder, Michael Fingerhood, and Margaret S. Chisolm, conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 participants who were in recovery from opioid use disorder. The interviews focused specifically on whether participants had experienced a “rock bottom,” what those experiences were like, and whether they had actually propelled the participants toward recovery. Two members of the study team independently coded each interview transcript using an inductive thematic analysis approach, resolving discrepancies through discussion and consensus before consolidating their findings into a final codebook — a method designed to let themes emerge from the data rather than imposing preconceived categories on it.

The headline finding is striking in its simplicity. Seventy percent of participants — 14 of the 20 interviewed — reported having experienced something they would describe as rock bottom. Yet only 10 percent, just two participants, said that a rock bottom experience actually motivated them toward recovery. In other words, the overwhelming majority of people who reached the kind of devastating low point that popular wisdom treats as a catalyst did not find in it any push toward change. The floor they hit was not a springboard; it was simply more suffering.

The researchers did not stop at counting. Their analysis identified four recurring themes that characterized rock bottom experiences: loss of social connection, character erosion, loss of resources, and a loss of the will to live. Participants described becoming isolated from family and friends, watching their sense of moral identity disintegrate, exhausting their financial and material supports, and in the most severe cases arriving at a state in which life no longer felt worth living. These are not the ingredients of motivation. They are the ingredients of despair — and despair, the study suggests, tends to entrench addiction rather than dissolve it.

Where, then, does the motivation to recover actually come from? For 85 percent of participants — 17 of the 20 — the answer lay in what the researchers call “turning points”: discrete events that redirected the trajectory of a life. Three themes dominated these turning points: parenthood, near-death experiences, and incarceration. Becoming a parent, or facing the prospect of losing a child, gave many participants a future worth protecting. Surviving an overdose or another brush with death confronted them with the fragility of the life they wanted back. And incarceration, whatever its harms, imposed a forced pause that some participants used to reorient. Crucially, these turning points differ from rock bottom in a fundamental way: they point toward something, rather than merely documenting everything a person has lost.

That distinction has profound clinical implications. If rock bottom is not a motivator, then the widespread advice to “let them hit bottom” — the instinct of families, and sometimes of clinicians, to withhold help until a person’s life collapses completely — has no empirical footing. The authors note that the idea of rock bottom may be stigmatizing, framing people with addiction as people who must be broken before they can be fixed, and that it may hinder timely support for addiction. In a period when opioid use disorder remains a major public health crisis and physician workforce shortages already hamper the treatment response, waiting for an imaginary floor is a luxury that individuals, families, and health systems cannot afford.

The study’s most conceptually ambitious move is its connection to the idea of human flourishing. The four themes of rock bottom — lost connection, eroded character, lost resources, and lost will to live — map with striking precision onto the domains that flourishing researchers, including the Harvard-based Global Flourishing Study, use to describe a life going well: close social relationships, character and virtue, material and financial stability, and a sense of meaning and purpose. Rock bottom, in this framing, is not a mysterious psychological event but the systematic collapse of the very domains that make human life flourish. The researchers suggest that the promotion of human flourishing may therefore lead to sustained recovery — a reframing that shifts the clinical question from “how bad must it get?” to “what does this person need to build a life worth staying sober for?”

The findings on what sustains recovery reinforce this reframing. When the researchers examined the factors critical to maintaining recovery over time, two themes emerged: rebuilding social connection and character growth. Participants who stayed in recovery described reweaving relationships, repairing their sense of who they were, and growing into people they could respect. This aligns with a substantial body of prior research on recovery capital — the internal and external resources a person can draw on to initiate and maintain recovery — which has repeatedly linked social networks and identity reconstruction to long-term outcomes. It also echoes earlier qualitative work showing that people who recover, whether through treatment or on their own, typically describe a shift in identity rather than a single moment of surrender.

None of this means that moments of crisis are irrelevant. Near-death experiences, after all, were among the most common turning points, and a growing literature on “hitting bottom” in alcohol use disorder has attempted to operationalize the construct precisely because people do describe such moments. What the Johns Hopkins study clarifies is the direction of the causal arrow. Crisis alone does not generate change; change is generated when crisis is joined to hope, connection, and a plausible future. A near-death experience motivates when there is something on the other side of survival — a child, a relationship, a self worth becoming. Pure degradation, unaccompanied by any of these, tends only to deepen the spiral.

The study has limitations inherent to its design. Twenty participants, all currently in recovery, cannot represent the full population of people with opioid use disorder, including those who died before reaching recovery or who never entered it. Qualitative thematic analysis, however rigorous, is interpretive by nature. Yet the consistency of the themes, the careful dual-coding process, and the convergence with decades of recovery research give the findings considerable weight. And the practical message is urgent: rather than waiting for people with opioid addiction to lose everything, clinicians, families, and policymakers should be working to strengthen the very things addiction destroys — relationships, character, resources, and hope. Recovery, this research suggests, begins not at the bottom, but at the first glimpse of a flourishing life.

Subject of Research: Rock bottom experiences and turning points in recovery from opioid use disorder and their relationship to human flourishing

Article Title: Rock Bottom Is Not a Motivator: From Opioid Addiction to Human Flourishing

Article References: Rock Bottom Is Not a Motivator: From Opioid Addiction to Human Flourishing. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-026-10848-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11606-026-10848-y

Keywords: opioid use disorder, rock bottom, addiction recovery, turning points, human flourishing, qualitative research, motivation, recovery capital, stigma, social connection, Johns Hopkins, Journal of General Internal Medicine

The review, conducted by Xiaocui Sang of Qingdao Agricultural University and colleagues at Hainan Medical University, UCSI University and Shandong Normal University, followed the PRISMA 2020 reporting guidelines and searched three major bibliographic databases—the Web of Science Core Collection, PubMed and the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials—for controlled studies published between 2022 and 2026. To be eligible, studies had to involve adults aged 60 years or older and measure loneliness or evaluative subjective well-being, a category the authors defined to include life satisfaction, subjective happiness, positive affect and negative affect. Out of the search, 24 studies met the criteria and were synthesised narratively rather than pooled in a meta-analysis, a decision that reflects the sheer diversity of the underlying trials.

That heterogeneity is the review’s central technical finding. The included studies differed across comparator types, outcome measures and risk-of-bias profiles, making it impossible to combine their results into a single, confident estimate of effect. Some trials used inactive control groups, others used active comparators; some measured loneliness with the well-known UCLA scales in their three-item or eight-item forms, while others assessed life satisfaction with instruments such as the Satisfaction With Life Scale, the Life Satisfaction Index-Z or the Life Satisfaction Scale for the Elderly, and happiness with the Subjective Happiness Scale. Positive and negative experience were captured with tools like the Scale of Positive and Negative Experience. When the measuring sticks, the comparison groups and the methodological quality all vary this widely, the authors argue, the aggregate picture becomes blurred rather than clarified.

Within that blurred picture, some patterns did emerge. The review found that certain kinds of programmes reported favourable loneliness or affective outcomes more often than others—particularly movement-based interventions, neighbourhood-oriented programmes and multicomponent schemes that combined several elements at once. This is an intuitively appealing result: a walking group organised around a shared neighbourhood route, or a programme that layers exercise together with other activities, plausibly creates more occasions for genuine social encounter than a solitary gym prescription. But the authors are careful to note that these signals came from a body of evidence that was uneven in quality and design, not from a set of rigorous, replicated trials.

The picture was weaker still for evaluative subjective well-being. Evidence for effects on life satisfaction in particular was described as weaker and less consistent than the findings on loneliness or affect. This distinction matters conceptually. Loneliness and affect are, in psychological terms, closer to momentary or relational states, while life satisfaction is a global judgement a person makes about their life as a whole. An exercise class might lift mood for an afternoon or make a weekly social ritual more enjoyable, without shifting the deeper evaluative question of whether a person considers their life satisfying. The review suggests that the field has often conflated these different layers of well-being, measuring whichever outcome was convenient rather than the one a programme was theoretically designed to change.

Perhaps the most consequential finding concerns how the social dimension of these interventions has been designed—or, more often, not designed. The authors examined the social-design features of the programmes and found that these features were unevenly specified across studies and rarely tested as mechanisms. In other words, researchers frequently assumed that putting older adults in a group would generate social connection, without deliberately engineering the relational content of the programme or measuring whether that connection actually occurred. Group delivery or digital delivery, on its own and without explicit relational content, did not provide reliable evidence of social benefit. A Zoom exercise class or a crowded fitness session, the review implies, is not automatically a social intervention; proximity is not connection.

This distinction between incidental and intentional social contact is the intellectual core of the paper. Physical activity is promoted vigorously in later life, yet its capacity to reduce loneliness remains uncertain when social contact is merely a by-product of participation rather than a deliberately designed outcome. The authors’ conclusion points toward a more disciplined experimental architecture: future studies should separate physical and relational objectives, so that the exercise component and the social component can each be evaluated on its own terms, and should test social mechanisms directly—measuring, for example, whether the frequency or quality of social interaction within a programme mediates any change in loneliness. Without such mediation analyses, the field cannot say why an intervention worked, or whether its social label was doing any work at all.

The review also exposes gaps in who has been studied. Analyses of delivery mode, participant context, sex, gender and equity-related factors were limited across the included evidence. This is a significant omission for a field with obvious policy implications. Loneliness in later life is not distributed evenly, and programmes that work in one setting—a suburban community centre, an urban clinic, a rural village—may fail in another. If trials do not report or analyse results by sex, gender or socioeconomic context, practitioners and policymakers are left guessing about which older adults stand to benefit and which may be left out. The authors call explicitly for future evaluations across diverse populations and settings.

Methodological rigour was another recurring concern. The review assessed risk of bias using the revised Cochrane tool for randomised trials and the ROBINS-I instrument for non-randomised studies of interventions, and the included evidence spanned a range of bias profiles. The authors registered their review on the Open Science Framework, a step that supports transparency in the synthesis process. The work was supported by the 2025 Hainan Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project and by a Doctoral Research Start-up Fund from Qingdao Agricultural University, and the authors declared no competing interests. The study was published open access on 6 October 2026 as a peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript carrying a permanent DOI.

For a public increasingly told that loneliness is a health hazard on par with smoking, and that the antidote is simply to get moving with others, the review delivers a sobering dose of nuance. It does not say that exercise fails to combat loneliness; it says that the evidence does not yet allow anyone to claim, with confidence, that it does—or to identify which social-design features of an activity programme make the difference. The 24 included studies, spanning movement-based, neighbourhood-oriented, multicomponent, group and digital formats, collectively show that some approaches report favourable outcomes, while the field as a whole lacks the design discipline to prove causation or mechanism. Until researchers begin treating the social architecture of an exercise programme as seriously as its dose, intensity and duration, the promise that physical activity can mend the social lives of older adults will remain exactly that: a promise awaiting proof.

Subject of Research: Effects of physical activity interventions on loneliness and subjective well-being in older adults

Article Title: Effects and social design features of physical activity interventions on loneliness and subjective well-being in older adults: a systematic review

Article References: Sang, X., Kong, D., Li, C., & Liu, Y. (2026). Effects and social design features of physical activity interventions on loneliness and subjective well-being in older adults: a systematic review. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08416-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08416-4

Keywords: older adults, physical activity, loneliness, subjective well-being, systematic review, social design, healthy ageing, life satisfaction, randomised controlled trials, geriatrics, public health, social connection

The research team, led by Yunbo Shen, Huiting Wang, Jie Wu, and Xianglian Yu, conducted an exhaustive search of five major databases—Web of Science, PubMed, and three Chinese-language repositories, CNKI, Wanfang Data, and CQVIP—covering the entire history of each database up to September 2024. From the initial pool of records, the researchers identified 58 eligible publications that together contributed 61 separate effect-size estimates, encompassing a combined sample of 7,322 participants. The studies spanned an extraordinary range of approaches: group art therapy for older adults living alone, reminiscence therapy built around traditional festival activities, cognitive behavioral therapy delivered in community settings, social robot programs, exercise regimens for rural elderly residents, internet-based self-help with human or automated guidance, and caring contacts interventions for healthcare providers and patients alike.

To synthesize this evidence, the team followed the PRISMA protocol, the international standard for transparent systematic reviews, and processed the data using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software. The headline finding was a pooled effect size of g = −1.47, with a 95 percent confidence interval ranging from −1.70 to −1.24. In practical terms, this means that across all included studies, participants who received a loneliness-targeted intervention reported substantially lower loneliness than those in comparison conditions. An effect of this magnitude is considered large by conventional benchmarks in psychology, suggesting that interventions of many different kinds can meaningfully reduce the subjective experience of social disconnection.

But the raw pooled figure tells only part of the story, and the researchers were careful to flag its limits. The analysis revealed an I² statistic of 94.64 percent, an extraordinarily high degree of heterogeneity. In meta-analytic terms, I² describes the proportion of variability in observed effect sizes that reflects true differences between studies rather than chance. When I² approaches 95 percent, it signals that the studies being pooled are measuring something that behaves very differently across settings, populations, and designs. The authors themselves caution that the pooled estimate should be interpreted with care precisely because the underlying studies diverge so widely in what they show.

To probe the sources of that variability, the researchers turned to meta-regression, a technique that treats study characteristics as predictors of effect size across multiple statistical models. Five moderators emerged as statistically significant: geographic region, intervention format, intervention duration, study quality, and participant dropout rate. In other words, where a study was conducted, what kind of program it tested, how long the program lasted, how rigorously it was designed, and how many participants abandoned it all shaped the apparent benefit. Yet even taken together, these factors explained only a limited proportion of the overall variance, meaning that much of the difference between studies remains unexplained by the variables researchers routinely record.

Just as revealing were the factors that did not matter. The mean age of participants and the gender ratio of the samples showed no significant influence on intervention outcomes. This null finding challenges a common assumption that loneliness interventions work better for particular demographic groups, or that age and sex composition alone determine whether a program will succeed. It suggests instead that the mechanics of the intervention itself, and the context in which it is delivered, are more decisive than who the participants happen to be in aggregate terms.

The methodological implications of the review are pointed. The authors call for future studies to make greater use of blinding, in which outcome assessors are unaware of which participants received the active intervention, a safeguard long considered essential in clinical trial design since the influential quality-assessment work of Jadad and colleagues in the 1990s. They also urge researchers to incorporate follow-up designs that track whether reductions in loneliness persist after programs end, rather than measuring outcomes only at the immediate conclusion of treatment. Without such follow-up, it remains unclear whether interventions produce lasting change or merely temporary relief that fades once structured social contact is withdrawn.

The review also identifies a significant gap in the evidence base: adolescent loneliness. While a large share of the included studies focused on older adults—a population in which loneliness has been extensively documented, from empty-nest elderly in Chinese communities to older migrants and nursing home residents—programs designed specifically for teenagers remain comparatively scarce. This is a notable omission, given that cross-temporal research has tracked rising loneliness among Chinese adolescents between 2001 and 2019, and that qualitative work with adolescents contacting counseling services suggests young people experience loneliness in distinctive ways that adult-oriented programs may not address. The authors explicitly recommend that future research focus on this developmental stage and explore additional moderating variables that might explain why some interventions succeed where others falter.

The broader significance of the findings lies in their double message. On one hand, the large pooled effect offers genuine encouragement to clinicians, community organizers, and policymakers who have invested in loneliness-reduction initiatives, from national campaigns to neighborhood-level programs such as community challenges designed to strengthen social ties. The evidence indicates that these efforts are not futile; across thousands of participants, structured interventions have reliably moved the needle on a feeling that many once considered impervious to deliberate change. On the other hand, the extreme heterogeneity and the limited explanatory power of known moderators serve as a warning against one-size-fits-all solutions. A program that transforms loneliness for isolated seniors in one country may do little for adolescents in another, and the reasons why are only partially captured by the variables researchers currently track.

For a field that has matured rapidly since the foundational theoretical work of Peplau and Perlman in the early 1980s framed loneliness as the gap between desired and achieved social connection, this meta-analysis marks both a milestone and a starting point. It confirms with unprecedented statistical weight that loneliness is tractable, while mapping the terrain that remains unexplored. The research, funded by the Graduate Scientific Research Foundation of Jianghan University and Hubei Provincial education and teaching research programs, was based entirely on previously published studies and required no new data collection from human participants. As governments and health systems worldwide elevate social connection to the status of a public health priority, the Jianghan University team’s synthesis provides both the evidence that action is worthwhile and a candid reminder that the science of doing it well is still very much a work in progress.

Subject of Research: The effectiveness and moderators of interventions designed to reduce loneliness

Article Title: Effects of interventions on loneliness reduction: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Article References: Shen, Y., Wang, H., Wu, J., & Yu, X. (2026). Effects of interventions on loneliness reduction: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Current Psychology, 45(19), Article 1573. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10131-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10131-7

Keywords: loneliness, meta-analysis, systematic review, interventions, moderating effects, mental health, social connection, older adults, adolescents, psychology, effect size, heterogeneity

The research, led by Jorge Andrés Delgado-Ron of Simon Fraser University and Kiffer George Card of the University of Victoria, alongside colleagues across Canada, set out to evaluate whether candidate numeric targets for social connection are stable enough to anchor population-level guidelines. Two initiatives have shaped this debate. The first, led by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, proposed quantitative benchmarks for network size, interaction frequency and relational diversity based on the available evidence. The second, the Canadian National Recommended Public Health Guidelines for Social Connection, deliberately avoided numeric cutoffs altogether, instead emphasizing universal design principles such as accessibility, inclusion and environments that enable connection for everyone, captured in statements like “Make social connection a priority throughout your life.” The new study was designed to determine whether the data themselves favor one approach over the other.

To do this, the team analyzed repeated cross-sectional data from the Canadian Social Connection Survey, an annual online survey of Canadians aged 16 and older conducted between 2021 and 2024. After excluding the 2021 baseline because of instability in the loneliness measure during the pandemic period, the final analytic sample comprised 1,325 participants with a median age of 62. Respondents reported how many close friends they had and how many days in the past week they spent at least five minutes socializing with friends. Loneliness was measured with the validated six-item De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale, which distinguishes emotional loneliness, the felt absence of close attachment figures, from social loneliness, the lack of belonging to a broader network. Secondary outcomes included depressive symptoms and generalized anxiety symptoms measured with the PHQ-2 and GAD-2 screeners, and self-esteem measured with the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale.

The statistical approach was deliberately flexible. The researchers fitted generalized additive models, or GAMs, with tensor product smooths to visualize the joint, non-linear effects of friend count and socializing frequency, then used segmented regression to estimate breakpoints, the specific values at which the slope of an association changes. Effective degrees of freedom near one indicated a straight-line relationship, while values of two or higher signaled curvature or threshold-like behavior. This two-stage design allowed the team not merely to assume diminishing returns but to formally test where they begin, a step that previous studies of social connection and health had rarely taken.

The headline findings reveal two distinct thresholds. For social loneliness, the benefits of additional close friends were steep up to an estimated breakpoint of roughly 6.7 friends, with each additional friend associated with a meaningful reduction in loneliness scores, and the association flattened to near zero beyond that point. For emotional loneliness, the breakpoint arrived much earlier, at approximately 3.5 friends, after which additional friendships contributed little. This divergence makes conceptual sense: emotional loneliness is relieved by a small number of confiding, attachment-based relationships, whereas social loneliness reflects integration into a wider network and responds to breadth of ties. The thresholds for the secondary mental health outcomes, ranging from 3.0 friends for depressive symptoms to 3.7 for generalized anxiety, aligned closely with the emotional loneliness breakpoint, suggesting that the largest gains across most outcomes occur as friend counts rise from zero to about four.

Time spent socializing told a different story. The association between days spent with friends and both forms of loneliness was essentially linear, meaning each additional day conferred a small but steady benefit. For depression and poor self-esteem, however, the relationship was non-linear, with the strongest improvements occurring up to about 1.6 and 1.5 days per week respectively. For generalized anxiety, benefits accumulated linearly with each additional day. Taken together, the authors suggest that spending at least two days per week socializing with friends is a reasonable floor, while additional time continues to help counter loneliness for those willing and able to socialize more often.

The most striking results emerged when the sample was stratified by mental health screening status. Among people who screened negative for both depression and anxiety, the social loneliness breakpoint was only about 2.5 friends. For those screening positive for depression it was around 4.0 friends, but for those with anxiety alone it rose to approximately 8.0 friends, and for those with both conditions to about 7.0. The pattern for socializing days was even more heterogeneous: among people with depression, social loneliness paradoxically increased with more socializing up to about 3.6 days before declining, while among those with anxiety, loneliness fell up to roughly 4.0 days and then trended upward. Three-dimensional response surfaces also revealed that people with anxiety who reported many close friends but spent little time with them showed high social loneliness, whereas people with both conditions showed elevated loneliness even at high levels of both exposures.

These subgroup patterns carry a caution for anyone hoping to distill social health into a single number. Fixed targets are attractive because they are simple to communicate, easy to monitor and useful for surveillance and evaluation. But the study shows that a cutoff derived from the whole population can misrepresent the needs of subgroups: a target calibrated to the average person would underestimate how much connection people with anxiety may need, while potentially overlooking paradoxical responses among people with depression. The authors note that loneliness and depression can form a self-reinforcing cycle in which social withdrawal and difficulty communicating about mental health exacerbate both conditions, and that interventions may need to move beyond simply increasing contact, supporting safe disclosure and helping networks respond supportively instead. Prior research on existential isolation similarly suggests that contact alone does not guarantee feeling understood.

The study has limitations that the authors acknowledge candidly. The measures of social exposure capture quantity rather than the quality, reciprocity or emotional depth of relationships, and thresholds may differ across lines of racialization, gender identity and other axes of marginalization. The screening tools used are brief instruments rather than diagnostic assessments, the sample skewed older, female and toward higher prevalence of mental health symptoms, and the cross-sectional design precludes causal inference. Some subgroup analyses rested on sparse data, particularly at high levels of both exposures, and the authors could not fully rule out mischievous responding among the small number of participants reporting extreme values. Still, the sample spanned all Canadian provinces and three years of post-pandemic data collection, and the flexible modeling approach represents a methodological advance in testing, rather than assuming, threshold effects.

The broader conclusion is that no single numeric target can adequately capture the complexity of social connection as a determinant of health. The optimal level of connection appears to be context-dependent, shaped by the outcome of interest, life stage, social norms and individual mental health. The findings support a hybrid message: for most people, meaningful gains come early, going from isolation to a handful of close friends and from no social contact to a couple of days per week of socializing, so recommendations to increase socialization remain broadly beneficial. But the specific breakpoints observed here should not be enshrined as universal targets. Instead, the authors argue, guidelines should emphasize flexible, inclusive and context-sensitive principles, as the Canadian guidelines do, with person-centered approaches such as social prescribing translating those principles into tailored, community-based support. In a field racing to write its first population guidelines, this study offers a sobering and useful reminder that the arithmetic of friendship is not one-size-fits-all.

Subject of Research: Testing whether quantitative thresholds for social network size and interaction frequency are stable across loneliness and mental health outcomes in a Canadian sample.

Article Title: Are quantitative targets for social network size and interaction frequency appropriate for public health guidelines on social connection? Evidence from loneliness and related mental health outcomes

Article References: Delgado-Ron, J. A., Orpana, H., Roddick, C., Mulligan, K., Pinel, E. C., Helm, P. J., Oliffe, J. L., Coplan, R. J., Benoit, C., Joordens, S., Skakoon-Sparling, S., & Card, K. G. (2026). Are quantitative targets for social network size and interaction frequency appropriate for public health guidelines on social connection? Evidence from loneliness and related mental health outcomes. SSM – Population Health, 36, Article 101970. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2026.101970

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: loneliness, social connection, public health guidelines, mental health, depression, anxiety, self-esteem, social network size, Canadian Social Connection Survey, threshold effects, emotional loneliness, social loneliness

The study, led by researchers working at the intersection of social epidemiology and gerontology, set out to answer a deceptively simple question: do different long-term trajectories of loneliness and isolation carry different health consequences? Rather than measuring loneliness at a single point in time, the investigators followed older adults across repeated assessments, allowing them to distinguish between people whose loneliness was transient—flaring up after a bereavement or a move, then fading—and those for whom it became a chronic, entrenched feature of daily life. This longitudinal approach is critical, because the health effects of feeling isolated for a few difficult months may be very different from those of feeling isolated for years.

The conceptual foundation of the work rests on a distinction that has become increasingly central in the field. Social isolation is an objective condition: it describes the size and structure of a person’s social network, the frequency of their contact with others, and whether they live alone or participate in community life. Loneliness, by contrast, is subjective. It is the gap between the social connection a person wants and the connection they actually have. The two overlap but are far from synonymous. An estimated significant fraction of isolated individuals do not report feeling lonely, and a comparable fraction of lonely individuals maintain ostensibly adequate social networks. Treating them interchangeably, the researchers argue, has muddied decades of health research.

By characterizing chronic loneliness and chronic isolation as distinct phenotypes—and examining combinations of the two—the study moves the field toward a more clinically useful taxonomy. Some older adults in the analyzed cohorts were persistently lonely but not objectively isolated. Others were persistently isolated without reporting loneliness. A third group experienced both, and a fourth experienced neither, maintaining both robust networks and a satisfying sense of connection over the study period. These phenotypes are not merely descriptive conveniences. Each represents a different configuration of social circumstances, psychological states, and potentially different underlying biological and behavioral pathways to poor health.

The relationships between these phenotypes and health outcomes are where the work carries its greatest significance. Loneliness and isolation have been repeatedly associated in the broader literature with elevated risks of cardiovascular disease, stroke, dementia, depression, anxiety, and all-cause mortality. Proposed mechanisms range from behavioral pathways—lonely and isolated individuals may smoke more, exercise less, sleep poorly, and delay seeking medical care—to physiological ones, including sustained activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, elevated inflammatory markers such as interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, and impaired immune regulation. Chronic subjective loneliness, in particular, has been described as a form of prolonged stress, keeping the body in a state of heightened vigilance that erodes health over time.

What the phenotype-based approach adds is the possibility that these mechanisms differ depending on the pattern of disconnection. Chronic loneliness, as a subjective distress state, may operate primarily through stress physiology and its downstream effects on inflammation and cardiovascular function. Chronic isolation, by contrast, may act more through the loss of social resources: fewer people to notice symptoms, encourage treatment adherence, provide transportation to appointments, or offer practical and emotional support during illness. If this is correct, then interventions tailored to one phenotype may fail for another. Expanding the social calendar of a chronically lonely person with a large but unsatisfying network may do little to relieve their distress, while providing companionship to a contentedly solitary person may address a problem they do not feel they have.

The mental health dimension of the findings is equally consequential. Depression and loneliness are known to reinforce each other in a damaging feedback loop: loneliness increases the risk of depressive symptoms, and depression in turn drives social withdrawal, deepening the disconnection. Anxiety, cognitive decline, and suicidal ideation have also been linked to prolonged social disconnection in older populations. By identifying which chronic phenotypes carry the strongest associations with mental health deterioration, the research offers a roadmap for screening. Primary care physicians, geriatricians, and public health agencies could, in principle, use brief assessments to sort at-risk older adults into meaningful categories and direct them toward the interventions most likely to help—whether that means cognitive approaches to reframing social perception, structured opportunities for new connection, or practical support for maintaining existing relationships.

The timing of this research could hardly be more pertinent. Populations across high-income countries are aging rapidly, and the proportion of older adults living alone continues to climb. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an unprecedented natural experiment in enforced isolation, and its aftermath left many health systems confronting a surge in reported loneliness among older people. Several national governments, including the United Kingdom and Japan, have appointed ministers for loneliness, and the World Health Organization has established a commission on social connection, formalizing the recognition that loneliness is a public health problem rather than a private misfortune. In the United States, the Surgeon General’s 2023 advisory on the epidemic of loneliness and isolation compared the mortality impact of social disconnection to smoking up to fifteen cigarettes a day, a framing that catapulted the issue into mainstream policy debate.

Turning that policy attention into effective action, however, requires precisely the kind of granular understanding this study provides. Meta-analyses of loneliness interventions have found disappointing average effects, with many programs producing only small or short-lived reductions in loneliness. Researchers have increasingly attributed these weak results to a one-size-fits-all design philosophy: interventions aimed at increasing social contact do not address the maladaptive social cognitions that sustain subjective loneliness, while psychological therapies do nothing for people whose fundamental problem is the absence of anyone to contact. A phenotypic framework allows interventions to be matched to the actual structure of each person’s disconnection, potentially improving both effectiveness and the efficient use of limited public health resources.

The study also raises pressing questions for future research. If chronic loneliness and chronic isolation confer partly distinct health risks, investigators will need to disentangle the biological signatures of each—comparing, for example, inflammatory profiles, autonomic function, and even gene expression patterns across phenotypes. Researchers will also need to explore how these phenotypes develop in the first place: what distinguishes an older adult whose grief-related loneliness resolves from one whose loneliness calcifies into a chronic state? Personality traits, early-life attachment patterns, socioeconomic insecurity, chronic pain, sensory impairment, and neighborhood environments all plausibly shape these trajectories, and understanding the modifiable factors among them could enable prevention rather than treatment. For now, the message for clinicians and families is clear: ask not simply whether an older person is alone, but whether they are lonely, whether they are isolated, and for how long. The distinction may determine not only how they feel, but how long and how well they live.

Subject of Research: How distinct chronic loneliness and social isolation phenotypes relate to physical and mental health outcomes in older adults.

Article Title: Chronic loneliness and isolation phenotypes and physical and mental health in older adults

Article References: Ma, Y., Bone, J. K., Mayston, R., & Gao, Q. (2026). Chronic loneliness and isolation phenotypes and physical and mental health in older adults. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77683-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-77683-x

Keywords: loneliness, social isolation, older adults, aging, mental health, physical health, public health, longitudinal study, depression, social connection, gerontology, Nature Communications