Social and emotional loneliness in young, mature and older italian adults.

Subjective loneliness describes people who feel a disagreeable or unacceptable lack of meaningful social relationships, both at the quantitative and qualitative level. Three studies will be reported that used an Italian 18-items self-report loneliness measure, that included items adapted from scales previously developed, namely a short version of the UCLA (Russell, Peplau and Cutrona, 1980), and the 11-items Loneliness scale by De Jong-Gierveld & Kamphuis (JGLS; 1985), plus 2 single-item criterion measures of sad mood, and social contact. Participants further supplied information on a number of socio- demographic variables. In the first study, 50 to 70-plus year-old internet-users filled the test on-line. In the second study, participants were elderly men and women living at home or in residential care units; they were administered also depression, social network, and other scales assessing subjective well-being. In the third study, 207 participants, 17 to 75 year olds (M 32,5 SD 12,4), 57% women, answered the JGLS, plus measures of well- being and emotional intelligence (including TIEIT (Zammuner 2007, 20008; Zammuner & Kafetsios 2004) and Msceit (Mayer, Salovey & Caruso 2002). In all studies the results confirmed the reliability of the component subscales and showed that JGLS social and emotional loneliness were significantly correlated with each other, as was JGLS emotional with the ‘general’ UCLA loneliness. Results further showed that loneliness scores were significantly predicted by a variety of socio-demographic and well being variables, including: sex, age, education level; sad mood and social contact (study I and II); depression level and social network quality (Study II); felt emotions, life satisfacton, and various components of emotional intelligence (Study III). The obtained results will be discussed as regards their implications for life quality in young, mature and alderly people, and the measurement of loneliness across cultures.