Knowledge Bank

A growing body of research reveals that loneliness has the potential to negatively impact physical and mental health. Therefore it is important to improve our understanding of risk factors for loneliness. Among those factors are dimensions of personality/temperament. However, extant studies of such factors are limited in that they have focused purely on main effect relations. Current models of temperamental risk emphasize interactive relations among such dimensions. For example, Rothbart’s model emphasizes interactions between two reactive dimensions (i.e., negative and positive affectivity; NA and PA) and one self-regulatory dimension (i.e., effortful control; EC) in relation to a wide range of outcomes including anxiety and depression. The current study extends this model for the first time to loneliness. Three interactions were predicted (i.e., NA x PA, NA x EC, and PA x EC) and tested in a context in which risk for loneliness is high: the transition into college life. In a sample of 146 first-quarter, college freshmen, contrary to expectation with expectation, we did not find significance in our predictions. Although hypotheses did not achieve significance, the magnitude of the effect sized was sufficient to be significant in a bigger sample size. Implications for future research are discussed.