From San Diego to Italy, study suggests wisdom can protect against loneliness

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/uoc--fsd092820.php

News Release 1-Oct-2020
Cross-cultural study finds a strong inverse correlation between loneliness and wisdom
University of California - San Diego

Over the last few decades, there has been growing concern about loneliness across all ages, particularly in middle-aged and older adults. Loneliness, defined as feeling isolated or not having an adequate number of meaningful personal connections, is consistently associated with unhealthy aging and has been identified as a major risk factor for overall adverse health outcomes.

In a recent cross-cultural study, researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine and University of Rome La Sapienza examined middle-aged and older adults in San Diego and Cilento, Italy and found loneliness and wisdom had a strong negative correlation.

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"Both loneliness and wisdom are personality traits. Most personality traits are partially inherited and partially determined by environment," said Jeste.

Wisdom has several components, such as empathy, compassion, self-reflection and emotional regulation. Researchers found that empathy and compassion had the strongest inverse correlation with loneliness. People who were more compassionate were less lonely.

"If we can increase someone's compassion, wisdom is likely to go up and loneliness is likely to go down," said David Brenner, MD, vice chancellor of UC San Diego Health Sciences. "At UC San Diego, we have considerable interest in enhancing empathy and compassion to reduce levels of stress and improve happiness and well-being."

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Jeste noted that a limitation of this study was that it was cross-sectional. Only longitudinal studies can establish cause-and-effect relationships. Next steps will include testing an intervention to increase compassion for reducing loneliness.