Personal contact helps reduce feelings of loneliness among older people. Other ways of contacting people, such as calling, emailing or texting, are not as effective in reducing loneliness, a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Michigan have found.
The findings, published today in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B Psychological Science, have implications for the health and well-being of many older people.
“We wanted to see how older adults respond when they are lonely and what impact different types of social contact have on that loneliness,” said Shiyang Zhang, study co-author and UT postdoctoral fellow in human development and family sciences. “We found that when older adults feel lonely, they are more likely to pick up the phone and call someone. But in-person visits were the only type of contact that actually reduced the level of reported loneliness.”
Scientists have long known that regular social contact is important for mental and physical health and contributes to longevity in old age, while loneliness has been linked to heart disease, cognitive decline and even premature death. Although many older adults have chronic medical conditions and mobility problems that can make face-to-face contact difficult, the new study suggests that face-to-face contact is an important part of any comprehensive effort to combat loneliness in older adults.
The study was conducted in the Austin, Texas, area in 2016 and 2017, before the COVID-19 pandemic expanded the use of digital communication for many people and made many older people more isolated. But even after the pandemic, a significant proportion of older adults do not own smartphones and do not use the internet. The study followed more than 300 people over the age of 65, asking them every three waking hours about levels of loneliness and social contact, including whether those social contacts were in person, by phone or digitally, which the researchers defined as texting or connecting through social media.
The study also looked at whether the social contact was between people with strong or weak social ties. The researchers found that when older adults felt lonely, they were more likely to turn to their close friends and family. It turned out that face-to-face contact – even with someone they had weak ties to, such as an acquaintance – was better at predicting lower levels of loneliness than, for example, a phone call with a family member or friend with whom ties were stronger.
“Although telephone contacts are available most of the time and provide an opportunity for older people to socialize when they feel lonely, it appears that telephone contacts are not as effective as face-to-face contacts in reducing loneliness,” Zhang said. “Telephone and digital contacts do not provide older people with the same emotional closeness and comfort as face-to-face contacts. They are simply not a substitute.”
Karen Fingerman, the Sonia Wolf Wilson Regents Administrative Professorship in Human Ecology in UT’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, Zexi Zhou, a UT doctoral student, and Kira S. Birditt of the University of Michigan also authored the paper. The research was funded by the National Institute on Aging, UT’s Center on Aging and Population Sciences, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
