Solitude: Alone but Resilient

ongoing

It is undeniable that social connections and interactions are key to the human experience. Perhaps for this reason, laypeople and scientists alike have assumed that being alone is aversive, a state inexorably tied to lonely emotions and sense of isolation. Yet solitude is experienced daily by nearly everyone, and though it can be negative it can also be a constructive and rewarding time. What makes some more psychologically resilient to solitude and why do some experience fewer of the negative and more of the positive emotions associated with this potentially challenging state? The SOAR project will integrate fragmented literatures and model contributions of predictors at event, individual, and cultural levels. This ambitious three-part project consists of complementing qualitative and quantitative approaches and will be the first to build a conceptual model through open science methods, offering intrinsic value to research conducted outside of the field of solitude. WP1 explores what solitude, and psychological resilience within it, means to people in different circumstances through semi-structured interviews, imagery, and written narratives. WP2 tests predictors of psychological resilience within solitude to develop a conceptual model, first with a novel diary study approach to capture solitude as it occurs, then with a large-scale multi-nation assessment, and finally with older adults. Finally, WP3 develops a resilience in solitude intervention as an experimental test of the model, and conducts a field experiment with older adults. The radical shift in theory, and use of novel, multifaceted approaches, will guide our understanding of how humans respond in the immediate absence of social connections, and pave the way for further understanding self-processes, the role of the self in relation to interpersonal interactions and society, and psychological resilience more broadly.