Research
Everything the Center has published, most recent first. 258 items.
2 September 2026
The World Health Organization's Commission on Social Connection attributed 871,000 annual deaths to loneliness. The figure is real, but it is a modeled estimate built on odds ratios from a literature the Commission itself says is thin outside high-income countries.
1 September 2026
Multiple surveys using different instruments agree that young adults report the highest loneliness rates, while older adults report the lowest -- inverting the assumption that built much of the policy response.
29 August 2026
The Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey now anchors a widely cited loneliness estimate, but its response rate sits below 10%. What that does to a national figure, and how it compares with the survey instruments it is often set beside.
24 August 2026
The claim that closing bowling alleys and libraries drives up loneliness and, in turn, mortality risk is plausible and widely repeated. The published evidence establishes each link separately but not the chain.
19 August 2026
Across national and cross-national surveys, adults under 30 consistently report more loneliness than adults over 65. The pattern is robust; the explanation offered for it is not.
3 August 2026
National loneliness figures are typically reported as a single population average. Data on friendship networks and social prescribing uptake suggest that average obscures a specific and worsening subgroup: men with few or no close friends.
28 July 2026
A large Bristol-led study links loneliness to poorer mental health and wellbeing. It is cross-sectional, and that limits what it can support in the way of clinical recommendation.
20 July 2026
National loneliness strategies increasingly single out young adults as the highest-risk group, but almost every randomised trial testing an intervention was conducted on people over 60.
8 July 2026
A twelve-month panel study finds chatbot companionship predicts rising loneliness; a broader review of the same literature calls the evidence mixed. The disagreement is about design, not just data.
8 July 2026
Buffet, Timeleft, 222, Pie and Meetup are increasingly described as responses to the loneliness epidemic. No trial has measured whether any of them changes a loneliness score. What the evidence base would need to look like before that claim is available.
29 June 2026
Julianne Holt-Lunstad's 2015 meta-analysis split social isolation, loneliness, and living alone into three separate risk estimates. That definitional split reshaped a decade of research, though population surveys have been slow to follow.
24 June 2026
A review of the older-adult literature finds isolation and loneliness are routinely measured, reported, and cited as if interchangeable, despite evidence that they carry independent risk and respond to different interventions.
22 June 2026
National loneliness figures range from 17% to 61% depending on the country and the question asked. A comparison of the instruments behind those numbers explains most of the spread.
20 June 2026
A single mortality estimate moved from a 2015 meta-analysis through a Surgeon General advisory to a WHO figure of 871,000 deaths a year. Tracing that path shows what got simplified along the way.
19 June 2026
The claim that loneliness carries mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day appears in nearly every account of the loneliness epidemic. The underlying comparison has not been independently replicated; it has been repeated.
7 June 2026
A June 2026 longitudinal study tracks isolation, loneliness, and well-being in community-dwelling older adults over time. What the design buys, and what it does not, is worth spelling out.
3 June 2026
Surveys converge on a striking figure -- young adults report more loneliness than any other age group -- but the instruments behind that figure are not built to say why, or what would change it.
30 May 2026
National strategies from the UK, Japan, WHO and the U.S. Surgeon General address loneliness and social isolation together. The evidence says the two constructs have different predictors, different interventions, and different measurement requirements.
24 May 2026
The comparison between loneliness and smoking, repeated by the U.S. Surgeon General and cited widely since, traces to a single 2010 meta-analysis. No independent study has since reproduced that specific figure.
18 May 2026
The 20-item UCLA Loneliness Scale has become the closest thing this field has to a common instrument. Its wording embeds assumptions about loneliness as an individual, relational deficit that shape which policies get funded and evaluated.
17 May 2026
Federal guidance urges the health sector to address loneliness across the lifespan, but the trial evidence behind that recommendation comes almost entirely from studies of adults over 65. What exists for young adults is prevalence data, not intervention evidence.
11 May 2026
Cost estimates for loneliness and social isolation circulate widely, but the underlying evidence base for translating prevalence and mortality risk into dollars or deaths is thin. A look at what the figures can and cannot support.
10 May 2026
National surveys consistently find loneliness highest among young adults, not older adults, even as most policy and clinical attention has been built around the older population. The gap traces to a real distinction between isolation and loneliness, not a single contradiction in the data.
8 May 2026
National and global surveys report wildly different loneliness rates among older adults because they ask different questions and measure different things. A comparison of the instruments behind the numbers.