Teens who spend more time alone aren’t necessarily lonelier, new study suggests

A recent study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology suggests that while spending time alone increases feelings of loneliness in the moment, adolescents who are frequently alone are not necessarily lonelier overall. The research provides evidence that the quality of a person’s social interactions and their specific personality traits play massive roles in shaping how young people experience social isolation. These findings help explain why some teenagers successfully navigate solitude while others face chronic struggles with social disconnection.

Adolescence represents a period of significant biological and social change. During this time, young people slowly shift their focus from their parents toward their peers as they attempt to form their own identities. This transition creates a heightened need for social belonging and acceptance.

Because their peer networks are often still unstable and developing, teenagers face an elevated risk of feeling socially isolated. Loneliness is generally defined as the uncomfortable feeling that occurs when a person’s actual social connections do not meet their personal desires. This subjective experience is common among youth and is linked to negative mental health outcomes, including risky behaviors and academic difficulties.

“When first thinking of loneliness, it is often associated with being alone; that only quantity counts in the development of loneliness,” said Cara Luisa Wicher, a doctoral student and psychotherapist in advanced training at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. “We wanted to explore how aloneness and loneliness are related to each other in the daily life and how the presence of others and maladaptive personality traits affect levels of loneliness in the particularly sensitive developmental period of adolescence.”

The threshold at which this negative feeling emerges tends to vary greatly from person to person. A psychological concept known as the differential reactivity hypothesis proposes that people possess systemic differences in how they respond to social situations. In other words, lonely individuals do not necessarily encounter more social stressors, but they tend to react more strongly to the stressors they do face in their daily lives.

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Psychological scientists wanted to better understand how daily social environments interact with personality to produce feelings of isolation. They specifically focused on maladaptive personality traits. These are deeply ingrained, unhealthy patterns of thinking and behaving that make it difficult for a person to adapt to everyday life or form healthy relationships.

Features of these unhealthy traits include high levels of negative emotion, a tendency to detach from others, and difficulty controlling impulses. Because severe personality struggles often begin to emerge during the teenage years, understanding how these traits influence daily social experiences provides a window into youth mental health.

To study these daily fluctuations, the researchers used a tracking method called ecological momentary assessment. This technique involves pinging participants on their smartphones multiple times a day to capture their feelings and behaviors in real time. This approach reduces memory biases and offers a highly exact picture of daily life outside of a laboratory setting.

“A key strength of the study is that it captured adolescents’ experiences in real time using ecological momentary assessment rather than relying solely on retrospective questionnaires,” Wicher told PsyPost. “This allowed us to examine how loneliness fluctuates from moment to moment across different social contexts. Such fine-grained insights can help us better understand loneliness as a dynamic experience rather than a stable trait.”

The study included 294 adolescents and young adults aged 12 to 21, with an average age of 17.5 years. The sample was 58.5 percent female, and the vast majority were born in Germany. The participants demonstrated high compliance, answering exactly 27,503 out of 32,340 scheduled smartphone prompts.

Over a 14-day tracking period, participants received seven daily prompts, except on Sundays when they received six. An additional survey was sent at the end of each evening. Each prompt asked the youth who they were with, where they were, and how lonely they felt in that exact moment.

Before starting the two-week tracking period, participants completed baseline questionnaires. These initial surveys measured their overall, long-term loneliness and their levels of maladaptive personality traits. A close friend or caregiver also provided a secondary rating of the participant’s personality traits to ensure diagnostic accuracy.

The researchers found that teenagers reported higher levels of loneliness during the specific moments and days they spent alone. Interestingly, older adolescents felt this momentary loneliness more intensely than younger participants when they were by themselves. Male participants reported feeling less lonely when alone compared to female participants, which aligns with evidence that teenage girls often have a stronger social orientation.

Despite this momentary spike in negative feelings, comparing different individuals to one another revealed a different pattern. Individuals who generally spent more time alone throughout the two weeks did not report higher overall loneliness than their highly social peers. This provides evidence that solitude alone does not automatically equate to chronic social isolation.

“One of the most surprising findings was that adolescents who spent more time alone overall were not necessarily lonelier than others,” Wicher noted. “Loneliness seemed to depend less on how often someone was alone and more on how they experienced and evaluated their social relationships.”

The presence of other people only reduced loneliness if those people were close, valued companions. When participants were with friends, romantic partners, or family members, their feelings of isolation dropped significantly. Being around weaker social ties, such as classmates or coworkers, did not alleviate their loneliness at all.

Contextual factors also influenced these emotional experiences. The highest levels of loneliness were often reported when participants were interacting with people online or surrounded by strangers. The youth also felt lonelier on weekdays compared to weekends, likely because weekdays force them into environments like schools where interactions are less voluntary.

Maladaptive personality traits played a significant role in predicting these daily emotional experiences. Youth with higher levels of unhealthy personality traits reported greater average loneliness and more extreme fluctuations in their feelings from day to day. A personality domain called detachment, characterized by social withdrawal and limited emotional expression, was especially predictive of being alone more often and feeling worse.

This highlights the powerful internal effect of personality on subjective well-being. “We were also surprised that maladaptive personality traits increased overall loneliness although they were not more often alone over the study period,” Wicher said.

Another personality domain called negative affectivity, which involves experiencing intense and frequent negative emotions, strengthened the association between being alone and feeling lonely. A completely different domain called anankastia, characterized by extreme perfectionism and rigid behavioral control, did not make participants feel worse when alone. This suggests that highly perfectionistic youth might be less sensitive to social disconnection due to their self-focused nature.

The authors also found that daily social satisfaction partially explained the relationship between being alone and feeling isolated at the end of the day. Youth with maladaptive personality traits generally reported lower daily social satisfaction, leaving their fundamental social needs unmet. This indicates that loneliness in adolescence is not merely a function of social contact, but of perceived fulfillment within those relationships.

Summarizing the core message of the research, Wicher shared several key points. “Our findings suggest that loneliness is not simply about being alone and that both quantity and quality of social relationships influence how lonely adolescents feel,” Wicher said. “Youth felt lonelier when they were alone in the daily life. The presence of friends, family members and partners could reduce loneliness, but not weaker ties such as classmates or colleagues.”

“Thus, the mere presence of another person is not sufficient to reduce loneliness,” Wicher continued. “Youth with higher maladaptive personality traits show higher and more fluctuating loneliness in daily life. Furthermore, satisfaction with social contact plays a crucial role whether a person feels lonely at the end of the day or not.”

As with all research, there are some limitations. For instance, the smartphone prompts relied on a single-item question to measure momentary loneliness to avoid overburdening the teenagers. This brief measure might not capture the full complexity of the emotion compared to longer surveys.

It is also possible that participants intentionally underreported their social interactions. If the teens indicated they were with someone, the app triggered several follow-up questions. Participants in a hurry might have claimed to be alone just to finish the survey faster, potentially skewing the data.

Additionally, the participants were mostly from stable socioeconomic backgrounds and reported relatively low levels of clinical personality problems overall. This lack of diversity might restrict how well the findings apply to youth from marginalized groups or those with severe psychiatric diagnoses. The overall low levels of loneliness in the sample might also lead to an underestimation of certain statistical effects.

Readers should avoid assuming that spending time alone is inherently harmful to adolescents. Developmentally, it is normal for older teens to spend more time by themselves as they explore their independence and build their identities. The findings indicate that the quality of social contacts matters much more than the sheer quantity of interactions.

Future research could focus on more diverse samples to see if cultural or economic factors shift these daily social patterns. Scientists might also look into specific coping mechanisms, such as emotion regulation strategies, to see how they interact with underlying personality traits. Exploring how digital communication tools either soothe or worsen feelings of isolation will also be an important next step for developmental psychologists.

The study, “Daily manifestations of maladaptive personality traits and loneliness across social contexts in youth,” was authored by Cara Luisa Wicher, Susanne Buecker, Paula Philippi, and Aleksandra Kaurin.